Recently the CD player I was using for bench test of DAC's bit the dust and I really didn't feel like fixing it so I picked up a Marantz CD5000 to replace it. I gave it a quick test to see if the spdif digital out was working and it was.
Today, however is a different story. I had just completed putting Vishay Bulk Metal Foil resistors into the low pass filter section of my DAC and when I had finished I naturally wanted to test it to see if I managed to screw anything up. I observed that at 0dbfs the rms voltage was down about 0.56db on both channels, and the full scale square wave, which is clipped because my Digital Filter limits anything over 0dbfs, was not. I was rather puzzled for a moment, so I connected it to the transport I use in my system. Lo and behold everthing is back to normal.
I guess Marantz wanted to soften all that digital "clipping" found on so many pop cd's and added some amount of digital attenuation.
This really sucks for me because now I have to take into account that this unit will automatically attenuate any signal that it's fed.
My only comment here is that if this the Marantz response to the loudness wars then the least they can do tell me before I buy the unit.
Marantz
d.b.
P.S. Word to the wise here; things aren't what they used to be, Even the real cheap players could be counted on to digitally output a real 0 dbfs out of SPDIF output.
