CD Player/Transport Reviews

The six brass switches are arranged logically: Standby, Pause, and Stop are arranged from back to front on the left; Previous, Next, and Play are lined up on the right. Nonetheless, if your short-term memory was damaged in the '60s (or beyond), you'll want a well-lit location for your ZZ-Eight if you want to see the switch legends! Or you can use the full-function remote, which, while ergonomically neat, is probably not quite what purchasers of a $6900 CD player have in mind: it's a standard-issue black plastic job from Philips. The switches work efficiently, except when you want to skip forward to, say, track 8—you have to click Next eight times, and it takes a few seconds for the transport to catch up. Better to use the remote's numeric keypad.

Overall, however, the ZZ-Eight's hands-on performance is fast, straightforward, and refreshingly simple.

Setup & Sound
I placed the ZZ-Eight on a constrained-layer-damped Zoethecus equipment-rack shelf and, after listening with the supplied cone in and out over a period of a few weeks, I left it out. I heard no difference either way. Perhaps it makes a difference on a less stellar surface.

In the many months I had the ZZ-Eight in my system I used three brands of interconnect cable (Yamamura Millennium 6000, Cardas Golden Cross, Electra-Glide Tesla) and two AC cords (Yamamura Quantum, Electra-Glide Reference). During most of my listening I used the Ayre K-3 preamp with the ZZ-Eight, but when that had to go back to Santa Fe for measurements and photography I borrowed a Stax SRM-T1W passive line section, which I found to be extremely neutral, if not the last word in flexibility.

Without reference to the subtle but easily audible effects of cabling, the ZZ-Eight consistently provided the most open- and transparent-sounding digital-based music reproduction I've had at home. Whether due to what sounds like an ultralow noise floor, or the organizational, jitter-reducing benefits of the I²S bus—which transports the audio and clock data separately instead of merging them, as is done with both AES/EBU and S/PDIF standards—or for both reasons, the ZZ-Eight did the most convincing job of separating and focusing instruments in space of any CD-based system I've heard here.

Images were focused and layered front to back on a voluminous soundstage akin to what's attainable with good analog. Especially impressive were the boundaries between images and surrounding air—and though the player couldn't perform miracles with primitive transfers, there was none of the etch and edge of early digital.

One disc I haven't been able to get off the player is Olu Dara's funky, folky, earthy, jazzy In the World (Atlantic 83077-2, HDCD). It was recorded at the tube- and analog-laden Sear Sound in NYC by Danny Kopelson, and someone should release it on vinyl. But what the ZZ-Eight did with this HDCD disc has got to be at the outer limits of 16-bit digital's capabilities. (And no, your HDCD player isn't defective: the HDCD light blinks on and off on every player—an audible error in the transfer caused by a problem with the HDCD encoder at Masterdisk, discovered after In the World was pressed.)

Dara's trumpet was big, warm, three-dimensional, and focused at front-center stage. It sounded real: brash and brassy and round—as it does on the LP of Conjure (American Clave 1006, footnote 1). Dara's voice, too, was pure, round, and focused. There was also the kind of deep, tight, dynamic, but naturally "stringy" bass I usually associate only with vinyl. The feel of fingers on strings was communicated fully, giving the music a solid, believable foundation.

Speaking of HDCD: More and more CDs are encoded with it every day, though some don't bear the HDCD logo—like Columbia/Legacy's superb-sounding reissue of Dave Brubeck's Take Five, which, in terms of purity and resolution of inner detail, rivals Classic's outstanding all-analog LP version. Since you probably already own many HDCDs, if you're buying a new CD player or processor, you ought to hear them decoded on an HDCD player before you choose.

The ZZ-Eight combined the warmth and roundness of the EAD 9000 III HDCD processor with the rhythmically taut punch of the Naim CD2 player I reviewed in February 1997 (Vol.20 No.2). Today's best discs don't need softening or flattering with euphonic coloration, and the ZZ-Eight didn't do that. Its brutal honesty made the great discs sing and the bad ones scream in agony, which is as it should be.

Just out is a 20-bit remastered version of the great Sinatra at the Sands (Reprise 46747-2); comparing it to the original CD transfer really lets you know how far this medium has come. The new version gives you room sound—a convincing context for Sinatra and Basie's band. There's a much greater sense of the body of Basie's piano and of Sonny Payne's drum kit, which now has skin, metal, wood, and dynamic impact. The late singer's voice is free of grain, edge, sibilant spit, and glassy etch. It's attached to a body and sounds believable, hovering in space. Applause sounds like flesh, not like rain on a tin roof. And there's genuine blackness to the background—not that confused sense of nothingness the older disc conveys.

I sample more than 20 discs every day, looking for music worthy of a review. One after the other, the ZZ-Eight never gave away its flavor or texture—if it had any. Instead, the recorded personality of each disc shone through. Some were incredibly warm and inviting, like Kambara Music in Native Tongues (Water Lily Acoustics WLA-CS-63CD), a new "East meets West" recording featuring Los Lobos' David Hidalgo and the superb British guitarist Martin Simpson. Others, like the achingly beautiful pop masterpiece by the Pernice Brothers, Overcome by Happiness (Sub Pop SPCD 427), were leaner, more "in your face." But always, I sensed that I was hearing the truth of the production, not the CD player's interpretation. There was no area of sonic "sameness" that I could hear on every disc.

Cabling changes yielded subtle but easily audible differences. Switching from the Yamamura Quantum to the Electra-Glide AC cables caused a slight loss of midrange warmth, tighter bass, and blacker backdrops. Differences between Cardas Golden Cross and Yamamura interconnects were minimal—both wires are cut from the same rich, detailed musical cloth. But reinserting the Electra-Glide Tesla interconnect yielded a slightly leaner midband, somewhat better bass definition, and a blacker backdrop. I found Electra-Glide cabling in both places too much of a good thing, and settled finally on Electra-Glide AC cabling and Cardas Golden Cross interconnect.

Unfortunately, one of the truths the ZZ-Eight ruthlessly revealed was that 16-bit/44.1kHz processing, even when you start with a 20-bit transfer, simply is no match for good analog—and good analog (hardware and software) need not be expensive. You knew this was coming, so I'll keep it brief: As good as the new Sinatra CD is, when I compare it to an original Reprise LP I hear more "there" there on the vinyl, despite the primitive tape edits that Lee Herschberg has cannily cleaned up in the digital domain for the new CD. Herschberg also re-EQ'd the recording, releasing more "onstage" sound and less of the PA's horny warmth. So as good as the CD is, when I want to hear Frank or Nat King Cole at the Sands, it'll be on vinyl.

While the ZZ-Eight's image focus was as convincing as I've heard from 16-bit CD, when I compared Classic's LP and CD of Belafonte at Carnegie Hall I heard a purity and convincing reality on the LP that the CD just misses—but it's gotten oh, so close in some ways. I also listened to DCC's superb-sounding CD transfer of Bill Porter's recording of Elvis on Elvis is Back (DCC GZS-1111), and then played the 180gm vinyl version (DCC LPZ-2037): On LP, Elvis had not left the building. Classic's LP of Duke Ellington's Jazz Party in Stereo (Columbia/Classic CS 8127) and Mobile Fidelity's accomplished gold CD of the same title (UDCD 719) were remarkably close, though the vinyl still sounded richer, airier, more like the real thing.

None of this will come as a surprise to either Bow Technologies design-team member Karsten Svendsen or the importer—they heard it in my listening room. Even the JVC XRCDs, pure as they are, suffered ever so slightly in direct A/B comparisons with their vinyl counterparts. But while such differences are slight, they are fundamental to re-creating a sense of a real event occurring in space before your eyes and ears.

End of analog sermonette...except to say that the ZZ-Eight came as close as I've heard CD-standard digital come to sounding like pure analog. In doing so, it allowed me to really enjoy the things digital does better. All in all, a mighty impressive performance with both HDCD and non-HDCD discs.

Conclusion
As I was finishing up this review, I received a $300 Panasonic DVD A110 player, which includes 24-bit/96kHz decoding. I put the gold 16-bit/44.1kHz CD of Pulse (New World/Classic NW 319) on the Bow Tech and the 24-bit/96kHz version on the DVD player and did an A/B. I also put a second 16-bit copy of Pulse on the Panasonic and did another A/B. The sonic differences between the two 16-bit discs were considerable. The ZZ-Eight showed the cheap player what it's made of, producing rock-solid three-dimensional images, jet-black backgrounds, deep, taut bass, and a wide, deep soundstage—the kind most analog devotees never have thought 16-bit digital could produce. Nonetheless, the $300 DVD player sounded pretty good!

But when I A/B'd the 24-bit/96kHz DVD against the 16-bit CD, the $300 DVD player produced a bigger, warmer, richer, higher-resolution, more analog-like sonic picture. I can only imagine what that DVD will sound like on players engineered to the ZZ-Eight's standards. What I heard on the $300 player has sold me on the higher-resolution format. How much clout the few specialty audio companies licensing titles and producing playback gear will have on the marketplace remains to be seen.

If you have a large collection of CDs and want to buy your last top-shelf CD player, please consider the Bow Technologies ZZ-Eight. Its purchaser can be assured of getting a player that takes advantage of much of what has been learned about digital sound reproduction in the past decade. If I weren't a reviewer about to audition yet another HDCD player and I could afford the ZZ-Eight, I'd buy it and be done with it. It's that good. On the other hand, if you're into CD on the cheap, do yourself a favor and add these new 24-bit/96kHz DVD players to your short list. Then wait for the software to flow. Or should I say drip, drip, drip. I am.

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Footnote 1: This is a must-have LP or CD of the texts of Ishmael Reed set to music. And congrats to Reed for winning a MacArthur Foundation grant!