Pioneer DV-AX10 universal DVD/CD player Page 2

Walk around
For a DVD player, the DV-AX10 is an unusually large and hefty 53 pounds, the result of a heavy-gauge metal chassis and serious power transformers and heatsinks. The cabinet is nearly as large as a typical receiver's—almost twice as tall as a typical DVD player.

In the center of the DV-AX10's front panel, the loading drawer is covered by a folddown panel. Its operation is heavily damped, which means it's slow. Just above the drawer is a one-line, blue-lettered display that tells you which kind of disc you're playing: DVD, SACD, etc. Icons tell you which speakers are being addressed by the disc: a stereo pair or 5.1 surround, among other options. I found that to be a convenient feature, given the multiplicity of source material playable on this machine.

One unusual feature shows Pioneer's effort to make this a serious audiophile product: It allows you to turn off the player's video functions, an option some might choose to employ when playing music, to ensure that the video circuitry does not remain active and possibly interfere with the audio signal. Another front panel button prompts the machine to use its onboard digital-to-analog converter and not send the signal through a digital output. The player uses 24-bit/192kHz Burr-Brown DACs. (The highest-level DVD-Audio disc puts out a 24/192 signal.)

The rear panel offers a rich array of outputs, including balanced outputs for the main left and right signals. As expected from advance reports on the new formats, DVD-Audio and SACD are both available only from analog outputs. Eventually players offering either or both of these formats will use a single digital output, as DVD players now do for Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1-channel signals. But, as is ever the case, there is still no agreement on copy protection for these new formats, so manufacturers can offer only an analog output. Theoretically, analog signals are not as interesting to pirates as pristine digital signals.

For the audio portion of this review I used the Sunfire Theater Grand Processor II, reviewed in the September 2000 issue; unlike my reference processor, the Lexicon MC-1, it has a 5-channel analog input. The Sunfire uses a DB-25 computer-style connector for the 6-lead cable—not an ideal connector, in the view of many cable manufacturers. Monster Cable makes a DB-25-to-6-lead cable and provided one for this review.

Onscreen menus allow an extraordinary degree of picture adjustment—more adjustments than most televisions offer. You can turn the digital noise-reduction on or off, and adjust the sharpness of the picture at three points: Low, Medium, and High frequency. Running these controls from one end to the other produced modest changes in sharpness; I left them on High. There are also adjustments for white and black level, chroma level, luminance, chrominance, hue, and more. Many of these controls are superfluous—or ought to be, if you already have a properly calibrated display.

But as noted by Pioneer engineer Bill Whelan, anyone using this player with a front projector and an RGB input might find that he can't easily control black level, white level, and hue on the projector. In that case, the player's picture-setting controls are quite useful. In any case, suffice it to say that I'd rather have the option to control every part of a picture, even if I don't often use the controls.

The DV-AX10's remote is a full-featured gold affair, with only a few buttons backlit. (All of them should be.) Menu functions are accessed with a wheel that at first I found hard to use. It's small; I couldn't pull on it easily to move the cursor. The easiest way to activate it was to stick a fingernail under the opposite corner and pull.

Listening and Watching
I had the privilege last fall of reviewing Sony's SACD player and an early preproduction prototype of Panasonic's DVD-Audio player for my main day-job employer, the New York Times. SACD, particularly, blew me away. It's not merely the next step up in performance from CD, but a new and vastly better medium.

I had some of the same discs for this review that I used for the Sony review late last year, plus some new ones. Admittedly, six months had passed since that review, but I found the quality to be as high with the DV-AX10 as it had been with the Sony. At this price level, and with recordings of this quality, differences are likely to be subtle in any case.

I had on hand several recordings on both conventional CD and SACD, and the difference was like riding in an SUV with bad shocks compared to a ride in a Lincoln Town Car. Once you hear an SACD, you might not be happy listening to CDs ever again.

The sound was so rich and warm that it gave me goosebumps. It seemed so much more real, as if a veil had been lifted, that it brought spontaneous smiles to several listeners' faces. One longstanding complaint about CDs is that they add a harsh edge to strings, voices, piano. With SACD, that harsh edge was simply gone.

Playing SACDs and CDs of the same music simultaneously and switching back and forth, the CD sounded muddy, even primitive. There's no question—this new format is not just marketing hype, but an achievement. Particularly striking were two discs by cellist Yo-Yo Ma that Sony recorded for internal and demonstration purposes. Stringed instruments are extraordinarily hard for a CD to reproduce accurately—they often come out hard, hard-edged, and unpleasant. But on SACD they were soft, warm, natural, utterly absorbing. I wasn't listening to the recording any longer; I was listening to the music.

X