O leitor de CD/SACD da Playback Designs continua a impressionar críticos das mais revistas um pouco por todo o mundo. Desta vez foi Michael Fremer crítico da conceituada revista Stereophile que ficou extremamente impressionado com o leitor.
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“With sonic consistency came a masterfully neutral top-to-bottom tonal balance that, regardless of format or resolution, combined a lush yet transparent midrange with deep, powerful bass below and, above, open, naturally airy highs that remained free of grain and digititis. The picture was spacious, remarkably delicate, and three-dimensional,particularly from SACDs. In fact,the Playback’s playback of SACDs was,if not identical to the dCS Scarlatti’s,easily in the same league for roughly one-fifth the price.
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As an SACD player, the MPS-5 is, or is very close to, the best I’ve heard, put there by its dynamic capabilities, resolution of transients and detail, image specifi city, three-dimensionality, bottom-end extension, and overall punch and immediacy. The Cary CD 306 SACD ($8000, which John Atkinson reviewed in November 2008) sounds exciting and is a reasonably good value, but it’s also somewhat lean and forward. The Marantz SA-11S2 ($3400, which I reviewed in February 2009) sounds warm and pleasant and is impressively built, but it failed to engage me the way the Cary could. The dCS Scarlatti ($79,999) is in a class by itself as an ambitious stack of components, but the Playback Designs MPS-5 plays on the same sonic fi eld for less than half as much, even if its sound was somewhat cooler and more analytical.
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I’m not suggesting that a $15,000 SACD player is inexpensive, but compared to some far more costly products that have passed this way, including the $80,000 dCS Scarlatti and the $28,150 Naim CD555, the compact, well-constructed Playback Designs MPS-5 offers impressive sound and build quality, and, with its multiple inputs, great versatility that includes upgradeability to multichannel. And its software-driven DSP means that performance upgrades are only a download away. You can even start with the DAC and upgrade it with the transport mechanism later, should you choose.
If you have a large collection of SACDs, you’ll fi nd the MPS-5 among the best-sounding players available today, combining great transparency, impressive delicacy and resolution of low-level detail, and, when called for, authoritative dynamic slam and depthcharge–like bass.
The MPS-5 is also an equally compelling- sounding CD player. I suggest you listen to your favorite CDs and hirez PCM fi les and make up your own mind. I found the Playback DAC’shigh-frequency cleanness, silent backdrops, and organizational skills impressive, and its overall sound rock-solid and very well controlled—and for sure better than the dCS Scarlatti’s upconversion of PCM to DSD.
So analog-like was the MPS-5’s decoding of SACDs and hi-rez PCM files that it has joined the very short list of
players that make me want to sit down, undistracted by other activities, and actually listen to digital recordings—as longas I don’t go back to the turntable!”
Michael Fremer in Stereophile
