Toy Review 2

Product Name: Yamaha CD-S2000 SA-CD Player
Reviewed By: Chris Croft
Magazine: Australian Hi-Fi: September/October 2008

There is something undefinably elegant about Yamaha’s newest high-end SA-CD player. No doubt this is mostly due to the use of a new ‘silent loader’ disc mechanism which means that rather than the usual large and somewhat bulky rectangular ‘plate’ on the front panel, there is just a single sliver of aluminium, just 6mm high. However I think it is also due to the fact Yamaha’s engineers have approached the design very tastefully: there aren’t too many controls on the front panel, and the display has been kept as small possible whilst still retaining its practicality and functionality. Then there’s the ‘old-worlde’ design, with the wooden end panels and the satin-finish aluminium front panel. However there’s certainly nothing ‘old-worlde’ about the insides of the CD-S2000. It uses all the latest SA-CD drive and support circuitry—not simply to extract the best from SA-CD discs, but also because using SA-CD technology is now generally acknowledged as the best way of extracting the ultimate performance from the CD format… for reasons that I hope to make clear further on in this review.

The Equipment

The layout of the disc transport controls is rather odd, not least because the forward and reverse track skip controls (which, as usual, also double as fast-forward and fast-reverse controls) are only half the height of the Play, Pause and Stop controls located immediately to their right. Why not make all five transport controls the same size? Likewise, the location of the ‘Play’ button is similarly unusual, but in fact I ended up really liking it, because it meant that the ‘Pause’ and ‘Stop’ buttons were at the end of the row, so if I suddenly wanted to stop play for any reason, I could just make a blind ‘jab’ towards the right-hand end of the row and be assured of play ceasing. I didn’t even have to look! Since I’m mentioning controls, I also found it a little odd that, in all, Yamaha uses four different button shapes on the front panel, when one would have suited just as well. One thing the company has got right is that the ‘touch’ of all the controls is absolutely superb. Before I used them, my premonition had been that they’d feel ‘clunky.’ How wrong I was! The ‘feel’ of all the controls is ultra-smooth and oh-sosilky. The same can be said for the operation of the disc drawer.

The ‘Pure Direct’ button makes an appearance for the first time on any Yamaha CD player, apparently inspired by the fact that the CD-S2000 is also the first Yamaha CD player to have two power transformers: a toroidal for the digital circuitry and a C-core for the analogue circuits. Unlike the ‘Pure Direct’ button on Yamaha’s amplifiers and receivers, pressing the ‘Pure Direct’ button on the CD-S2000 doesn’t re-route the signal: it turns off the front panel display and the digital output. This does, however, have the effect of reducing the level of digital and other circuit ‘noise’ inside the player, thus improving the performance of the analogue sections.

The SA-CD/CD button alongside the Pure Direct button is supposed to switch between the SA-CD and CD layers when you’re playing a hybrid SA-CD. I say ‘supposed’, because I could not get the switch to work on any of the hybrid SA-CDs I own. Basically, whenever I inserted any hybrid SA-CD, the Yamaha would steadfastly always play back the SA-CD layer, and wouldn’t allow me to switch to the CD layer. I confess that I wasn’t overly concerned about this because there seems to me to be little point in listening to music at CD quality when the superior-quality SA-CD quality is available, but maybe that’s just me.

The rear panel reveals that the Yamaha has multiple output stages, with both unbalanced (RCA) and balanced analogue outputs, and coaxial and optical digital outputs. Unlike some CD players, where it’s merely the final output stage that’s balanced, the Yamaha CD-S2000’s design is balanced right from the point at which the digital-to-analogue conversion takes place, after which it then remains completely balanced all the way to the output terminals, thanks to the use of Burr-Brown converters in differential mode.

Installation and Operation

When I first placed the CD-S2000 down on my equipment rack it wobbled on its four feet and I thought that either my rack had warped, or that the Yamaha had been dropped so badly it was buckled. I was wrong on both counts (again!). It turned out that the four heavy-duty feet fitted to the CD-S2000 have tiny ‘spikes’ that provide additional damping against vibration. However, the spikes are normally covered by four tiny round, disc-shaped neodymium magnets. What had happened is that one of the magnets had fallen off during transport, so the three feet that still retained the magnets were higher than the one without the magnet, which was what caused the CD player to ‘wobble’. Thus reassured, I looked carefully amongst the packaging and recovered the magnet, after which the review proceeded apace. I subsequently tried using the player with and without the magnets (all four of them) and am of the opinion that if your CD support surface is perfectly free of vibration, it makes little difference whether you use the magnets or not. However, if there are any sound-induced vibrations in your support, using the spiked feet definitely improves the overall quality of the sound. And, if it turns out your surface is not fl at, the feet can be individually adjusted for height.

Operationally, the disc tray operation was ultra-smooth, but not quite as quiet as I’d imagined it might be. And whereas I’d been led to believe from some postings on the ‘net that the tray was entirely made of aluminium, that didn’t seem to be the case on mine, which appeared to be made of white plastic, with aluminium only along the front edge (but perhaps it was plastic-coated alloy?…Editor). The disc itself doesn’t sit on the plastic, but on four raised rubber ‘supports’ which, although they certainly supported the disc properly, also made it a bit harder to properly locate the disc than usual. Load speed was also a tad slower than usual, taking around 15 seconds for a CD and 19 seconds for an SA-CD. I did like the fact that if you do happen to misload a disc, the transport doesn’t do the normal ‘to and fro shuffle’ but instead simply stops after six seconds of tray inactivity. If you load a disc upside down (easier to do than you’d think with some discs), the CDS2000 will attempt to play it for around 32 seconds before opening the tray door and representing the disc for your inspection… and without any ‘error’ message in the display.

Speaking of which, the display is in the champagne-coloured dot-matrix style, but due to the limited height of the display, the lettering is only 6mm high, so some people might find it difficult to read from any distance. It’s certainly bright enough to read from a distance if your eyesight’s up to it, but if it’s too bright for you, it’s possible to switch the display through four brightness settings and… of course, you can always switch it off, via the ‘Pure Direct’ switch as I noted earlier on.

Since I have more favourites on CD than I do on SA-CD, I started off the auditioning process listening almost exclusively to CD, and I have to say that the Yamaha CD-S2000 was truly impressive, delivering superb performance, irrespective of genre. Indeed, when listening to my current stack of favourites, it was immediately evident that the CD-S2000 was extracting far more depth, detail and imaging from them than either my Micromega or Linn Majik CD players. A current fave, Vento del Sud, featuring Benito Madonia (vocals) and Antonio Forcione (guitar), exhibited an improvement in ‘air’ around the guitar that was phenomenal. (Recorded at Master Studio, Sarnano, Italy, it’s on NAIMCD050.)

Back on the subject of SA-CDs, since being silly enough to confess in writing that most of my SA-CDs were purchased overseas (via www.sa-cd.net in case you were wondering, which listed 4,926 SA-CD titles as being available last time I looked), I have been getting lots of unrequested advice as to where I can buy SA-CDs in Australia. I am advised by multiple readers of Australian Hi-Fi that there is one mob in South Australia (www.australiansacd. com.au), another in Victoria (www. audiodiscs.com.au), and even one across the pond (www.intamusic.co.nz) that apparently all have good selections at fair prices. No doubt there are others around, but I haven’t heard of them. One thing I was sure of is that Yamaha’s CD-S2000 makes my SA-CDs sound incredibly good. And surely none could sound more incredible than the Argerich disc I keep raving about in my reviews (Avanti SA-CD 5414706 10232), thanks to the extra layers of detail SA-CD is able to reveal (compared to standard CD). It’s this detail that is the most compelling argument for improved fi delity. And the level of detail revealed by the Yamaha CD-S2000 was extraordinary… so extraordinary that I found it was nigh-on impossible to discern any audible difference between it and my Ayre Acoustics’ C-5ex when playing back SA-CDs. And when you consider the price differential between the two players, that’s at least 10,000 compelling reasons to prefer the Yamaha over the Ayre!

Conclusion

If you’re after a superbly constructed audiophile CD player which delivers high-end performance at a price so low as to be verging on the ludicrous, Yamaha’s CD-S2000 is a tour-de-force. It will play back your CD collection with a level of precision and fidelity that will have you going back for more, and more, and more. (Oh yes… and it plays SA-CDs as well.)

LAB REPORT

Readers interested in a full technical appraisal of the performance of the Yamaha CD-S2000 SA-CD Player should continue on and read the LABORATORY REPORT published in the included PDF document. All readers should note that the results mentioned in the report. tabulated in performance charts and/or displayed using graphs and/or photographs should be construed as applying only to the specific sample tested.