The ultimate CD-player!?

[pangea]

OK, now for one more opinion (like the world needs one more biased/uneducated opinion from yet another self appointed authority...)

I finally procured a Sony Playstation 1001. I decided to buy mine at the local pawn shop that gives in store credit if you find that your purchase was junk. I spent way to much: $25 for all cords, remote, BUT NO GAMES! (I have never owned video games, so I don’t know what I am missing).

To give one more piece of background, I had always heard that the most important piece of the stereo was the speakers, and not much else mattered. Thus the JBL habit. Then several years ago when I could not cure the “head cold” that the stereo developed when we moved to a new house, a began to replace the electronics from receiver to components. Suddenly the “head cold” was cured! Of course, that’s also when my electronic addiction got more serious, but that’s another story. I had also figured that the strongest link was the CDP, because the digital domain was originally touted to be better than the human ear was able to hear. So I did not think much about upgrading from my original Denon purchased in 1988 (which I am listening to at the office as I type). My current player in the main system is a consumer level JVC DVD player. With that in mind, my review.

Wow! I had no idea that there could be so much difference! Yes the soundstage seemed wider, and very smooth. I don’t think that I heard things that I had not previously, but what I did hear sounded great. It made my the bass tighter, and took away some of the harshness that I hadn’t realized had bothered me. This is even with using old and retired Radio Shack interconnects as that is all I had laying around. While I can’t disagree with Widget’s and other’s opinions when comparing it to high $$ CDPs, as I have never owned a high end CDP before. I can say that it blows anything available through normal consumer stores out of the water. It made me a believer that all digital readers/players are not created equal. As far as the controls, I can get used to that to get better sound. And by the way, mine has not skipped or dropped out once (yet).

eyestrain.

I'm very glad, to have been able to be of some help.

Do let us know if you're going to upgrade the cables and perhaps make som mods and please, do tell us if it made any improvements.

BR
Roland

[Anthony L100]

Hi Pangea, I stumbled upon this thread a few weeks ago and had to see for myself. PS1 SCPH-7502 model turned up this morning at a cost of £2.19!! I plugged it in, put a CD in, fired it up and............yeah, this ain't too bad. 5 minutes later, still thinking the same. Now this is just a first impression but I am fairly impressed! I normally use a Marantz CD7300 coupled to the PM 7200KI amp which IMO is a good combination. Just the fact that they are not a million miles apart is very encouraging, I love the Marantz. I have to carry out more detailed listening tests, especially at realistic levels and I will report back. Do you consider the earlier models to be a discernible improvement over the 7502? If so, I will try and find one. Thanks, Tony.

[hapy._.face]

UPDATE: Plugged it all up this morning and my first impression is disbelief; It does play nicer than expected. My main cd player (Rega Planet re-issue) was put out of commission recently, so there is no way for me to A/B the performance. I will say that as it stands- "It's no rega". The PS1 (1001) did track well, and had an overall "decent" presentation. There is a bit of "congestion"
which might be rectified by removing the MJM2100, A/V muti, and muting transistors. Updating the output stage, and jumping the current one might yield better performance as well. Time permitting- these will be my first modifications- I'll post results.

[pangea]

Hi Pangea, I stumbled upon this thread a few weeks ago and had to see for myself. PS1 SCPH-7502 model turned up this morning at a cost of £2.19!! I plugged it in, put a CD in, fired it up and............yeah, this ain't too bad. 5 minutes later, still thinking the same. Now this is just a first impression but I am fairly impressed! I normally use a Marantz CD7300 coupled to the PM 7200KI amp which IMO is a good combination. Just the fact that they are not a million miles apart is very encouraging, I love the Marantz. I have to carry out more detailed listening tests, especially at realistic levels and I will report back. Do you consider the earlier models to be a discernible improvement over the 7502? If so, I will try and find one. Thanks, Tony.

Yes, the earlier models are better. I've compared the 1002/5502/7502 and I find that the 7502 come in third, by a margin.

Shielding the power supply, better cables and other mods will improve the result even further.

Personally I use the 5502, because it's the most convenient one. It may be that I only had some bad luck with drop outs on the 1002. Now I have a few of them, for spare parts.

I have also noticed there can be small differences in sound within the same model, so if you have several, try them out and use the best one and keep the others for spare parts. It isn't that big of an investment after all.

BR
Roland

[pangea]

UPDATE: Plugged it all up this morning and my first impression is disbelief; It does play nicer than expected. My main cd player (Rega Planet re-issue) was put out of commission recently, so there is no way for me to A/B the performance. I will say that as it stands- "It's no rega". The PS1 (1001) did track well, and had an overall "decent" presentation. There is a bit of "congestion"
which might be rectified by removing the MJM2100, A/V muti, and muting transistors. Updating the output stage, and jumping the current one might yield better performance as well. Time permitting- these will be my first modifications- I'll post results.

Are you quite sure it's the PS1, congesting the music? Could it be it's only revealing problems?

I thought I had a bit of congestion earlier, but when I removed one x-over point, by removing the UHF driver, I got more details and better focus on the holographic sound stage.

Please come back and let us know how it's progressing.

BR
Roland

[richieb1971]

I don't know how much of this has been covered but I can tell you a few things about the first generation playstations.

SCPH-1000 - Launch Japanese machine released in Dec 94. Sockets included were the parrellel port, composite, svideo, L+R RCA's, vs link (2 connect 2 playstations for link up play) and the AV multi output. This machine was capable of the swap trick to play CDr games.

To perform the trick, you turn on the machine with the lid open, put a Japanese origonal game in the machine, go into the CD player option, use some blu-tac or putty to push the lid button down, the CD will spin to read the CD tracks and then it will stop (it will also insert the region boot code). You then take out the origonal disc and place the CDr inside, exit the CD player menu and the CDr game will boot up like an origonal game (this is because the button was pushed down, the machine never thinks you opened the lid on the machine). The only downside to doing this, is that the CD track table of contents will differ from the origonal game CD to the CDr, therefore alot of the time the wrong audio will play in the game if its in red book format. Most of the time, this is not an issue. This trick allows you to play USA games as well. It will boot up European/Australian games but they are in the PAL format, so unless you have an RGB connection you will get a black and white picture.


SCPH1001 - With Hong Kong and Chinese mass producing CDr versions of all Ps1 games in 1995 Sony revised the origonal hardware of the SCPH1000 so that the above swap trick became impossible. They also ommitted the svideo socket. Apart from that the SCPH1000 and 1001 models are exactly the same. You can still play CDr games on SCPH1001's, the only difference is you have to swap the disc midflight, when the screen first goes from white to black.

In September ish 95, the USA model was launched, which was the SCPH1001. You can do all the above with the USA SCPH-1001, except to do the swap trick you would need a USA game to boot up with.

Now obviously, in the day.. the CDrom units were not that good.. the SCPH1001 swap trick was used by alot of pirates and this put alot of wear and tear on the drives. It wasn't until 18 months later the first generation mod chips came about.. so thats 18 months of cdrom abuse.


Further revisions were made to the PS1 console. Most things have been documented.. Eventually Sony copied the other manufacturers of consoles by noticing that Sega were making a heap of cash from proprietory console leads/cables. By ommitting the rest of the standard connections on the PS1 Sony were able to drop the price of the machine from $300 to $200, but you had to buy a proprietory svideo cable, composite cable etc etc. The drive placement and construction was changed, the operating system was modified again to stop the midflight swap trick. The Parrellel port was ommitted also as it was used for cheat cartridges which also bypassed the region lockout which enabled CDr playback of games.


With the very earliest PS1's (1000-1001 models), if your drive is clicking and searching it is derailing. The cheapest way to fix this if you cannot be bothered to replace the drive is.............................Turn the machine upside down... YEP, you got it, turn the machine upside down.... This will benefit those people with CDr's and dropouts.


The SCPH1002 I believe is the European launch console. Same as SCPH1001.


Hope this helps someone out there

[louped garouv]

http://dogbreath.de/PS1/index.html

mod listing/how to for the PS1 if anyone wants to play with it....

[Moose]

Hi, just putting my 2c in the discussion. I haven't listened to one of these PS1's, but have investigated the components used in the construction. I have discovered that the DAC used is a standard cheap as chips unit with pretty average SNR (of 90dB).
Sure the transport of the PS1's might be good, but the DAC is not. It wouldn't cost too much to put something like a Wolfson DAC in there with 20 times better SNR and then put a better Opamp after it.. and so forth, but then you might as well use any CD transport. Seems the PS1 isn't that highly spec'd.

As to the guy a page or so back asking about the 32bit DAC, the DAC used (and in fact almost all DACs) are Sigma-Delta based, which means they are just 1 bit (they use a comparator as the DAC, which is very fast), but the audio on the CD is encoded in 16bit words (per channel), so any DAC saying that it is 16bit or whatever is referring to its wordlength (and 32bit - 2 channels at 16bits each), which must match what is beign fed into it. Having a higher sampling frequency is good too, as better filtering can be employed to remove artifacts and images from the signal. The PS1 DAC can run at sampling rates up to 50KHz, compared a decent DAC of up to 192.KHz.
Heres a link to the Sony based DAC http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datashe...KM/AK4309.html
and to a better Wolfson DAC http://www.wolfson.co.uk/uploads/doc.../en/WM8740.pdf

Got a friend who's going to build one of these up, so maybe I will reneg on my point of view, but we'll see. I personally think analog stages of music are just asking for noise and losses anyway, makes more sense to go from the CD transport straight to a digital PWM amp and skip out the noise injection.

Meh, just what I think as an electrical engineer as opposed to an audiophile.

Cheers

Seamus

[gerard]

Hello

Just want to tell I was using Ps1 1002 and found it very nice specially on high medium but I have tryed and buy a cyrus CD6 and I am very pleased with .
Nothing to compare , much larger spectral sound and also real harmonics .
I also listen to well known Cambridge audio azur was for me a very bad sounding device .

Gerard

[biddy67]

Which would be a good remote? I have the 1001 model. I've found this one which looks pretty cheap, but I'm unfamiliar as to the functions it would need to have and how easy to use it would end up being.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...ayphotohosting

[pangea]

Which would be a good remote? I have the 1001 model. I've found this one which looks pretty cheap, but I'm unfamiliar as to the functions it would need to have and how easy to use it would end up being.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...ayphotohosting

It looks good enough, but that does not say anything of its performance.
The price is right though.
Personally I'd try to find a Sony PS2 remote.

BR
Roland

[analogman]

Now I'm going to tell you something that you probably won't beleive in a million years.

I'll give you a tip, on hw to get your hands on what is probably one of the best CD-player ever made and the best part is, it won't cost you more than 30 US$ or so.

What you're saying... No I'm not kidding, I'm deadly serious!!!

So what's the big secret? OK, OK, hold your horses, I'll tell you.

Perhaps you've already got one, without even knowing about it.. OK, OK,

I'll tell you right away, but you've got to agree, the suspence is killing you, am I right or am I right...

Playstation PS1, is what you need, nothing more and nothing less.
The older the model, the better it is suited.

Right out of the box, it will be a real , which probably will outperform anything you may have got, below the 5000 US$ range and with only some minor shielding of the power supply and some better cables/connectors, it'll most likely blow away anything up to the 10k mark.

So, what's the big secret here?

First of all, it was designed to be sold in millions, so there were hardly any limits/restrictions quality wise, on the parts that were used.

It uses a 32 bit DSP, because it has to be able to handle graphics as well and when it's used only for audio, there's plenty of muscles left.

There's a German company modifying the US model (PSone) and then they're charging the customers 2500€ for the thing.

The best part is, you most likely wont hear any difference between the 2500€ player and the more modestly modified one.

And most importantly, how does it sound?

VERY open, airy, detailed and powerful, and a lot of other things, but I'll stop there...

Go for it, be bold, make the 30 US$ investment and try it out for your self.

Then tell me what you think.

BR
Roland

.........thank you enough The Rega Planet's sold, and out of here today. The PSOne kicked it's ass right out the door, DEAD STOCK.
And I'm just now getting the parts together for the full blown mods and power supply.
Going to pick up several as spares, and for parts.
Also very cool that most of them come with enough games that are still relevant enough to be re-sold and defer ALL costs.
High performance Red Book Sound for FREE.
Can't tell you how pleased I am to have a good reason to unload a 10 year old player (the time you start to think about service issues)

Enough to prove to me, what I've long suspected, that most $1,000.00 and up players, are in actuality, about $50.00 worth of parts, in bull-shit jewelry boxes.

Suburb,
Analogman

P. S. : And please, no bull shit lectures about research and development costs, ESPECIALLY with an outfit like Sony, who's shit is in, and makes up about 80%, of every branded player out there. Amortization-a-plenty.

[readswift]

that quoted post is uhh... LOL

[readswift]

i tought we re not kidding on this forum ! Uhh. Im still floored Moose Junior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 1 at least he tried something reasonable LOL ok this topic gets a 1 star from me right now this guy who beleives this is simply retarded

[readswift]

and you analogman don't dare to ask anything from me, you introduced yourself pretty much to not count on me, thanks .