Hi James,
I must admit I awaited with abated breath for the December hi-fi news to read the review on the BCD1. When I read it I was totally aghast by the journalism on the product. I am not showing any bias towards your products but I cannot understand how these people who supposedly profess an expertise in deciphering products produce an article which basically imparts that the CD player for the price is below par. '.. it nonetheless failed to engage this listener, holding back the real workings of music expected from a player at this pricepoint'. My main concern is that there is no mention as to the system used with the CD player. This I feel is important as most products work well with given electronics and can sound awful in others. Also the review compares this player with a Quad 99 which appears discredited in this review.
I am also concerned that THE CDS USED (PENTAGLE) would have difficulty in shining in any system.
Thus my conclusion on this matter is twofold. One is that two reviews in different magazines come up with different results and thus would largely influence the reader before auditioning. If you were to take the journalists together put them in a room and demonstrate the CD1 with the right ancillaries such as bryston pre-power and PMC speakers would their view change? (Almost certainly. CR)
Secondly I would be grateful if anyone owning the CD1 to give their view on this website as to whether they are happy with the CD1 and made the right choice. I understand that a great deal of preference is subjective but I cannot understand a product that can be highly praised on the one hand and virtually written off in another.
The Hi-Fi News review of the CD-1 player by Andrew Harrison reads a lot like other reviews of non-British products as written in the British Press: "We can find no technical flaws whatever in this product, in fact it definitively out-performs other (British) products we have reviewed. Having said that, we like the flaws in the British stuff better. They seem more 'engaging', somehow".
I guess we cannot realistically expect to 'win' an argument over opinions based on built-in preferences for flawed and colored reproduction, so we shall not attempt that here. What we can and will do, of course, is to point out their own measurements of the performance of the BCD-1, and disagree with the specious conclusions reached on the basis of that data.
One of the things said in the 'Lab Report' sidebar to the review was; "But here's the issue with such high-performing hardware like the BCD-1, hardware that vastly exceeds the potential of the 16-bit source material. So often, opening up the 'dynamic window' to way beyond the notional 96dB resolution of the format can serve to expose low-level distortions and other art(i)facts you'd rather not hear!" That statement is at variance with the laws of physics, and is at polar opposites with Bryston's philosophy of over 35 years in making the best audio equipment possible within the technical limits available at the time of manufacture.
The reason Hi-Fi News's statement is technically erroneous goes back to the very theory of digital recording, and includes something called 'dither'. Dither, of course, is the very low-level random noise injected into the digital signal at the time of recording, to reduce quantization distortion at the LSB level. That factor, together with the number of available bits, defines the lower end the dynamic range of the recording. That dynamic range, and the minimum level of distortion present at all levels within the quantized signal, can only be preserved with playback equipment whose own specifications exceed by a considerable margin the limits of the recording medium. In fact, if the playback equipment is, "like the BCD-1, hardware that now vastly exceeds the potential of the 16-bit source material", it will by definition be the most accurate presentation of the original recording possible.
To assume that the playback equipment has some role in obscuring the lowest-level material in recordings, on the assumption that it will 'hide' something unpleasant at the lower end of the dynamic range, (as was stated in the article), is deliberately to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It may possibly render an incompetently-produced recording more palatable, (though that is far from guaranteed), but it will certainly be at the expense of obscuring the gorgeous subtleties of the very finest recordings, and overlaying the playback equipment's limitations onto those of the recording medium. In other words, 'homogenizing' all your favorite recordings to a standard of mediocrity.
If that is what the reviewer personally prefers, that is one thing, and I suppose we should be thankful for the reviewer's honesty in alerting us to his perceptual and judgemental limitations. But to indict a technically superior piece of equipment on the basis that it is somehow 'too good' for the recording medium runs completely counter to the quest I think we all have, and certainly do at Bryston; to approach audible perfection as closely as technically possible. We are proud that the Bryston BCD-1 does exactly this, and I invite all to listen through it for the best reproduction of CDs available, as has been stated by all of the many other reviewers up to this point.
Chris Russell
CEO and Chief of Engineering,
Bryston Ltd.
