UHF No 70 (Net).indd - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

Listening Room
Shanling SCD-T200
It can hardly help looking familiar.
It is a near lookalike of the Shanling
CD-T100 that turned heads on
our issue No. 66 cover. We fi gured
you could have bought it for looks alone,
though in fact there were other reasons
to consider it.
The SCD-T200 is of course an
SACD player as well as a CD deck. That
extra functionality aside, the similarities
are striking. The analog gain stage also
uses four tubes, though with directoutput
jacks allowing you to bypass the
tubes if you want them just for show.
The headphone jack is still there, and
the build quality is still of a level that
must give the competition nightmares.
An electronic volume control is still
included, allowing direct connection
to a power amplifi er. This player still
comes with an upscale power cord which
includes a Schurter IEC connector and
a Hubbell hospital-grade AC plug.
Oh yes…and the jacks are still
marked “made in USA.” We love the
irony!
There are some styling differences
if you look closely. The rings around
the tubes are now acrylic rather than
resonance-prone sheet metal, and there
36 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
are only two of them per tube, making
them more easily removable for tube
swaps. Though the metal fi nish of our
player recalled that of the CD player, the
distributor tells us more recent production
models have an all-stainless fi nish,
without those warm copper and brass
accents.
Shanling has recycled some aging
Sony technology, including the transport
Sony used in its original C$8000
SACD player. Anything wrong with
that? Just one thing: the Shanling is
strictly a two-channel machine. Forget
surround sound.
When you read that, one of two
things probably happened: either your
turned the page, or you shrugged. For
our part, we’re with the shruggers. The
SACD standard, like the DVD-A standard
for that matter, has made surround
sound extraordinarily inaccessible. The
It plays SACD. It plays
CD too. It could even
be the player you’ve
been waiting for.
digital output will feed you a Red Book
data stream, but it will not give you access
to the SACD info, which means you
can’t have surround sound unless you
own a preamplifi er, integrated amplifi er
or receiver with at least one six-channel
input. Yes, they make such things now,
and some of them are even quite good.
A lot of audiophiles, however, have been
known to express the view that if God
had mean us to have 5.1 channels, He
would have given us more ears. Forgive
us if we choose to avoid getting into
theological arguments.
By the way, the demo disc included
with the Shanling does have several
multichannel tracks. Go fi gure.
The SCD-T200 has several options
besides the ones already mentioned. It
can upsample CD sound into SACD territory,
for one thing. The older machine
also did that, and we disagreed as to the
value, if any, added by such juggling. And
it has buttons on both the top panel and
the remote that allow you to play the CD
layer on a hybrid SACD. Unfortunately,
on some discs the Shanling went right
to the CD layer instead of the higher
resolution layer. There are front panel
lights showing which layer is being