Hi All,
There is a British review coming on the BCD-1 CD Player and I was asked to give a question and answer interview as part of the review (they really like it). Anyway, I thought it might be informative for everyone on Audiocircle.
BCD-1 Questions
Why wait 25 years to build your first CD player?
We had no intention of getting into the CD Player market but when we designed our Internal Stereo DAC about 3 years ago for our preamps the response in the market was overwhelmingly positive to say the least. Given that most people are fed up with all the ‘format wars’ we decided, based on our customers input, to offer a state of the art CD Player built around our DAC for the thousands of redbook CD’s and CDR’s that already exist.
Were you not tempted to go down the Universal player route?
Yes due to the increase in the home theater marketplace and the success of our surround sound processor, we did consider a universal player. Given the continued indecision on which format and when we decided to stear clear. Also universal players have issues with ‘clocking’ at multiples of the CD standard of 44.1KHz due to their video requirements.
What was it that appealed to you about the Crystal DAC you have selected?
We tested a number of DAC’s when we were designing the internal preamp DAC and felt that the Crystal performed and sounded the best, given our designs.
In the design of the CD Player we paid very close attention to the digital design: bit-timing errors (called jitter) have been eliminated by perfectly synchronizing the player’s master clock and drive. The Crystal CS4398 DAC is an advanced generation chip using a combination of several different conversion methods to optimize the digital processing. Each DAC has dedicated power supplies—a separate, closely regulated and filtered digital power supply as well as a heavily regulated and filtered analog power supply with carefully routed electrical grounds. Finally, careful trace routing throughout the complete circuit architecture of the BCD-1 eliminates potential noise via capacitive coupling, which delivers those critical extra dB’s of noise and distortion reduction.
All this being said about the concern for the digital stage of the player, I have to say that most quality DAC’s from the 5 different manufacturers we looked at performed very well. I think the significant difference in our CD Player is the Discrete analog stages around the DAC. The Bryston BCD-1 CD Player uses fully discrete Class A operational amplifiers after the DAC instead of the commonly used integrated circuits. The use of discrete devices enables exact matching of the needs of the DAC and allows for a more robust output than IC-based amplifiers. The use of discrete devices also allows us to select components with carefully matched input and output impedances based on specific in-circuit requirements
Can it be upgraded by using the MPS2 power supply?
No the MPS-2 will not work with the CD Player. Originally we were thinking of going down that road but discovered that we got much better performance by totally separating the Digital power supply section from the Analog power supply section in the CD Player. The other advantage of an internal power supply is that we can optimize the voltage and current required by the CD player.
