Philips 963SA normal characteristics?

thanks a lot for the responses, confirms my personal observation and enlightments me on a few other things.

1. Can someone help me out with the details on the $30 mod, the where and how. I think this is a mod I can do myself?

2. I bought this player used, so I think what I'm hearing right now is how thing are supposed to be. Radknee and gregm, I'm tempted to say that "neutral" is a euphemism for this thing. As an analogy, this is like a color TV that's been turned down halfway to black and white; just really low in saturation of tonal colors. Although you're right, it does have detail, midrange, openness...I'm not sure how well I can adjust to listening to near black and white music. My brother has fairly high end equipments (American: Audio Research, Adcom) and those sounds characteristically shallow and low in tonal saturation too. I'd sort of promise myself to stay away from that "neutral" kind of sound.

You know it goes back to the basic philosophy of high-fidelity: the attempt to reproduce real life instrument. Well, there's a guy who lives in my neighborhood who occasionally plays his saxophone in a nearby garden, and when I walked past him, I had to tell myself, man, this (real life) is really nice and warm, full bodied... that this is the reason why I like music.

3 So, for the sub $400 range, what would be a nice, warm player? I heard a used Rega Planet is a good buy at this range. With it being British made, I think it should be warm, yes?

The mod's about replacing the PS caps with blackgates. IMO, before you do anything, check out diyaudio.com on the 963 and/or contact Guido Tent -- an engineer who works for Philips & also devises mods (site). Cheers

Gregm and Mmrog, thanks a lot. So I'll give that mod a shot be4 blowing this thing off completely.

My other problem with this thing, is with the upsampling sounding a bit watery, unconvincing of real instruments. timbre different from unsampled, and is not even as convincing. Upsampling certainly has ovbious benefits of sounding more open, relaxed, and less digital, hard.

I had read somewhere concerning this that upsampling involves Digital Signal Processing, i.e. some kind of extrapolation process, which results in the lesser accuracy that's probably what I'm hearing. The same article said that hence, their company only doubles up to 88.2 kKz, as opposed to using DSP to extrapolate to 96 KHz or here, to 192 kHz.

Give it some time to break in. Usually 200-300 hours. I had mine for under 4 hundreds and I think it does a good job for it's price! It is a bit flat and uninvolving but that's Philips' characteristic. No, it was not a Japanese company but I think now part of it is own by Japanese?

For upgrading the inside stuffs? It's up to you. I decide to leave mine along and I moved it to my bedroom system.