The death of physical media has been greatly exaggerated. Just look at how vinyl has made an incredible comeback. There’s something special about owning music on physical media that is very satisfying. Music streaming services are excellent, but you only rent the music; you never own it. And what happens if the Internet goes down?
Denon is one of the world’s oldest audio brands and still has sufficient belief in the market for CD and SACD players to develop its latest separate discs player in the form of the new DCD-1700NE. The player has been designed to perfectly match Denon’s PMA-1700NE amplifier to create a brilliant legacy audio system.
As well as being able to spin regular CDs, the DCD-1700NE can also handle high-resolution SACDs and play DSD files up to 192kHz at 24 bits recorded on DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW discs.
The DCD-1700NE has been developed in conjunction with Denon’s team of Sound Masters, a group of employees with golden ears whose job is to subjectively tune products to make them sound as good as possible.
Central to the new player is the latest in analog waveform reproduction technology. Advanced AL32 Processing Plus uses data interpolation algorithms, up-sampling, plus bit-extension to support high-resolution audio. Denon says the resulting playback produces highly detailed audio, free of interference, richly expressive in the lower range and beautifully faithful to the original sound.
In an age when many CD players use basic optical drives to read discs, it’s good to see that Denon has built the DCD-1700NE around an original disc drive with a high-class S.V.H. (Suppress Vibration Hybrid) mechanism. This mechanism ensures the digital signal is recovered as accurately as possible and minimizes the chassis’s vibration, reducing any adverse audio effects.
To accurately synchronize all the digital circuits in the CD player, the DCD-1700NE has a DAC Master Clock design that treats the DAC as the master when clock signals are supplied. The master clock is right next to the DAC, which suppresses jitter and ensures peak precision in converting the digital signals on the CD into analog waves. It serves as the reference for semiconductor operation and optimizes digital audio circuitry.
Circuit patterns inside the DCD-1700NE have been thoughtfully engineered to ensure signal paths have been kept as short as possible. With shorter circuits, the interference between circuits and left and right channels is reduced, and the adverse influences on audio signals are minimized, producing clean, transparent, and faithful to the original recording.
Although it’s clear that the sales of CDs and SACDs have dropped considerably, billions of these silver discs are still in circulation. Many collectors feel an emotional connection with their carefully curated collection of CDs, often built up over many years and still offering excellent sound quality.
Pricing & Availability: The Denon DCD-1700NE is available now and costs $1,499 / £1,299 / €1,499.
More info: www.denon.com
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