CES 2010

Playback Designs MPS-5

By Jon Iverson • Posted: Jan 12, 2010

I hadn't seen this almost two-year-old company before, but was familiar with founders Andreas Koch, formerly with Studer ReVox and EMM labs, and Jonathan Tinn through his relationship with darTZeel. Sharing a room with darTZeel, Playback's MPS-5 was sitting in the center equipment rack spinning discs.

The MPS-5 plays both SACDs and CDs as well as accepting digital signals from music servers and the like. Retailing for $15,000, the transport is based on a modified Esoteric mechanism, and inputs on the back include AES, SPDIF, Toslink and USB (up to 48kHz).

I don't like to judge sound under show conditions, but this room sounded wonderful. And the company motto is pretty clever too: "Ear Responsible".

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Comments
Peter's picture
Submitted by Peter on January 15, 2010 - 6:25pm.

Good unit by all accounts.As they are very often seen with dartzeel stuff, it might be good if one could get it in the same red and gold .

GEORGE's picture
Submitted by GEORGE on January 19, 2010 - 3:49am.

Is that another typo? $1,500 right? Does it record, upsample to 2X DSD and all that other stuff. I think I have seen much cheaper units do much more. Why is THIS ONE now something different, another "break through". Probably NOT. Of course it sounded "wonderful" when do they not? Blu-Ray players are $100 now. RRED LED display? How 1980's. Not even something cool like OLED for that price? Anybody ever go to these guys and ask them if they are insane?

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