Sony SCD-XA9000ES / TA-DA9000ES Massive multichannel duo makes fine music Sony has ploughed everything it knows about audio into its latest flagship products, and it shows, says Andrew Everard

The so-called 'format battle' between DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD - as it's now designated - rumbles on. The latter seems to have taken a noticeable lead in terms of titles available - not to mention titles of interest to the classical music enthusiast - and the former has more hardware available, especially at the lower end of the market. That's in no small part due to the availability of budget-priced DVD-V/A players and universal machines, while the mass-market appeal of SACD is mainly down to Sony's own home cinema in a box systems, all of the current versions of which are SACD-compatible.

But Sony is far from giving up on SACD as a high-end technology, as is clear from the arrival of this heavyweight duo. Sony's new SACD/CD player comes with an i-Link/IEEE 1394 connection to carry multichannel audio in digital form. It is partnered with a real behemoth of an amplifier which has been designed for both multichannel music from SACD and D\TD surround sound in Dolby Digital and DTS formats. It uses a refined version of the company's S-Master digital amplifier technology.

Both pieces of equipment make clear their serious intent with their solidity of build and pricing - £2000 for the player, £2600 for the amplifier - and each is as notable for what it isn't as what it is. The player is not compatible with DVD formats, and the amp eschews the usual AV policy of including a radio tuner to create a receiver. Both are dedicated to high standards of performance, as is evident from the designs of all the elements of these components.

Although the design of the new player is very different, the basic thinking is the same as that of the SCD-XA777ES (reviewed 06/03), which I've been using as an SACD reference player ever since. The most notable change is the inclusion of that i-link to carry the Direct Stream Digital information to a suitable amplifier, such as the TADA9000ES.

This is the first Sony machine to do away with cables and come with with i-Link. The design idea is to implement Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP) to protect the music content from piracy; if the player doesn't get the appropriate signal back from the device at the other end of the cable, no digital data is transmitted. There are other refinements, but I'll come to those when discussing the amplifier.

The internal design of the SCD-XA9000ES is the result of a substantial reworking. Twin R Core toroidal transformers are used - one for the disc-playing servo and digital processing sections, the other just for audio -and the player is built on Sony's substantial Frame and Beam chassis, in which an outer frame is reinforced by twin girders crossing it, which are also reinforced. It's all about vibration reduction, and together with the transformers, this chassis contributes significantly to the weight of the player.

Dual discrete optical pickups are used in the disc-reading section - one for SACD, the other for CD - whereas some players use a single pickup and simply re-focus it for the two different formats. DSD decoding is handled by Sony's own Large Scale Integrated Circuit chip, which takes the data from the disc, dumps it into a buffer memory and reconstitutes it into a onebit output datastream.

Sony could have left it at that, manufacturing nothing more than a high-quality SACD/CD transport for use with an i-Link equipped amplifier. Instead, it has paid attention to those buyers who may want to use the player via its analogue outputs into products with multichannel analogue input socketry.

As a result, a significant amount of work has gone into the player's analogue design. Another LSI handles the digital signal processing needed for bass redirection, channel balance and time alignment when the player is used via its analogue outputs. Six proprietary Super Audio digital-to-analogue converters are used to handle the multichannel output, and for stereo use these converters are reconfigured to improve the unit's overall performance, with three DACs for each channel. These multilevel DACs are designed to combine the benefits of both multibit and single-bit conversion, the internal operation of the converters working to correct linearity errors.

If the player is impressive, the amplifier is even more so. Faced with the sheer size of the thing you might take with a pinch of salt everything you've ever heard about the compact nature of digital amplification. Much of that bulk, however, is accounted for by a massive toroidal transformer: having realised that it threatened to take up most of the internal space if positioned conventionally, the Sony engineers decided to mount it on its edge on a hefty bracket. Hence the height of the amplifier, which frees up space for the rest of the components.

The all-digital amplification here is the Pro version of Sony's S-Master technology; here it delivers a healthy 200W into each of the amplifier's seven channels, which should be more than sufficient for most needs. The beauty of the design, which uses DSD technology throughout, is that signals from the SACD player, received from the SCD-XA9000ES using i-Link, are kept in their native form throughout processing; they are simply fed through a low-pass filter before they reach the speaker terminals. Other input signals, analogue or other, lesser digital formats - such as those sourced from a DVD player - are either run through analogue-toDSD conversion or upsampled to DSD format before being processed and amplified.

As this is an amplifier as much about surround sound from D\TD as multichannel high-resolution music, it comes with the latest six/seven-channel versions of Dolby Digital and DTS. It can feed up to nine speakers and an active subwoofer - Sony's latest thinking for the ultimate in wraparound sound promotes an extra pair of forward side speakers as well as the usual left/right/center, surrounds and twin rears. Their idea is to imitate what you hear in cinemas, with their array of speakers along the side walls and to the rear to create surround effects.

If all this is too much for you - as I suspect it may be in most 'normal' rooms - the Son will work perfectly happily wit 7.1 or even 5.1 speaker set-ups, using processing effects based on specific dubbing theatres in Hollywood.

There are several neat touches to this amplifier, not least of which is a strategy designed to counter one of the side-effects of the almost perfectly flat phase characteristic of digital amplification. Since this doesn't mimic the phase performance of analogue amps, which tends to shift in the very low bass, the Sony can sound bass-light with some recordings.

Such discs have been engineered to compensate for the slightly bloomy low-end of some analogue amps, so when they're played through the Sony they can sound lightweight. The engineers' answer was to reintroduce some phase shift, not with an on/off switch, but with a variety of optional settings, allowing the user to tailor the effect to personal taste. You don't get more bass with any of these settings, but the quality of the low enc can be enhanced significantly.

When you use the units together, you soon discover that there is more to their synergy than just design and an i-Link connection - there's also HATS. This is Sony's proprietary Highquality Audio Transfer System, an makes use of the fact that i-Link carries not just highresolution digital audio in the form of the DSD signal, but it also control information. With HATS engaged, the amplifier takes control of theplayer, adjusting the speed of disc-reading and data transmission to ensure its buffer memory is continuously topped-up, thus avoiding digital distortion problems.

Performance

I've long been a fan of the SCDXA777ES SACD player, but the SCD-XA-9000ES betters it in just about every area. When I ran it in analogue into my reference multichannel system, it demonstrate a bass weight and levels of midband and treble detail that took full advantage of the SACD format. It's an excellent CD player, but with a disc such as the recent DG disc of Hoist's The Planets and Grainger's The Warriors (John Eliot Gardiner and the Philharmonia) - which is as near as we have right now to 'the disc for which SACD was made' - and the warmth, scale and sheer impact of the recording are impressive indeed.

The orchestra sounds at once massive and sparklingly nimble, and the sense of being enveloped in the recorded ambience is remarkable.This is a disc that should be played on a high-quality multichannel system to anyone who doesn't 'get' SACD: compare the CD and Super

Audio layers and it's really no contest. The high-resolution system isn't just impressive - it's a revelation.

But while the SCDXA9000ES builds on past Sony SACD successes, the TADA9000ES amplifier is simply awe-inspiring: that massive 200W-per-channel output stands it in good stead when it comes to delivering the scale and substance of orchestral music, but most breathtaking of all is its speed of respons. It's able to go from a hushed moment to a full orchestral tutti without any of that sense of 'taking a breath' you sometimes get with some designs; transients are delivered with full force and crisp impact.

It's quite unlike any amplifier I have ever encountered in this respect; as a result it is one of the most exciting listens around. And yet the amplifier does not draw attention to itself: the quality is something to which you soon become accustomed, and you only notice the difference only when you go back to lesser amplifiers, which can sound leaden and uninvolving by comparison.

There's never any harshness or lack of control about this big amplifier: whether playing music from the partnering SACD player or taking a conventional digital input from a high-quality D\TD machine - I was using the Arcam DV88+ for this test - the Sony has all the flexibility you should need.

And then that combination of power and poise delivers results that are consistently thrilling and entirely involving. Playing Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, resplendent with a powerful mix of music, the sound is full of drama, while the amplifier is just as impressive with concert and opera discs - especially those recorded with fine surround soundtracks.

If only the SCD-XA9000ES were a superb DVD player as well as a magnificent SACD/CD machine, this combination would be absolutely perfect, but that's almost missing the point: this is an amazing multichannel music package, and one which will delight home cinema fans, too.