No one really knew that the Philips transport is faulty. This includes Marantz, MF, Krell, EMM Labs and maybe others. The known "modders" like us (APL Hi-Fi), Modwright, Stan Warren and others were left helpless too.
This Philips transport is very nice and it was the pioneer when it comes to Multichannel SACD. It sounded amazingly good and it is built with extremely reliable laser pick-up/spindle assembly. It was simply one of the best CD/SACD transports at that time.
How can a designer be sure that only certain part of the Digital Signal Processor (the SACD decoder, a.k.a. FURORE) will fail after 2-3 years of use? Impossible!
Philips realized the failure, and even one of their engineering team came up with proposal for fixing the issue, but the cost was so high that they simply decided to move on. Still, they remain the only company to blame when it comes to this failure because they have announced the faulty part NLA (no longer available). Since this a proprietary application specific device designed by Philips, no other company is capable of fixing this issue.
In conclusion, this particular CD/SACD transport/DSP from Philips was one of the best to consider when designing CD/SACD player. None of the companies who used it in their players could have known about this failure, and none of them can fix it without the support from Philips, which is non-existent when it comes to this particular problem.
Hope this helps!
Best wishes,
Alex Peychev
www.aplhifi.com
This Philips transport is very nice and it was the pioneer when it comes to Multichannel SACD. It sounded amazingly good and it is built with extremely reliable laser pick-up/spindle assembly. It was simply one of the best CD/SACD transports at that time.
How can a designer be sure that only certain part of the Digital Signal Processor (the SACD decoder, a.k.a. FURORE) will fail after 2-3 years of use? Impossible!
Philips realized the failure, and even one of their engineering team came up with proposal for fixing the issue, but the cost was so high that they simply decided to move on. Still, they remain the only company to blame when it comes to this failure because they have announced the faulty part NLA (no longer available). Since this a proprietary application specific device designed by Philips, no other company is capable of fixing this issue.
In conclusion, this particular CD/SACD transport/DSP from Philips was one of the best to consider when designing CD/SACD player. None of the companies who used it in their players could have known about this failure, and none of them can fix it without the support from Philips, which is non-existent when it comes to this particular problem.
Hope this helps!
Best wishes,
Alex Peychev
www.aplhifi.com