"Is that a J in your ad, or a fancy Y?" I asked Dick Sequerra.
"It's a Y. My ad man made me do it."
"Yudge for yourself," reads Dick Sequerra's ad in the July and August '94 issues of Stereophile for his Power Station for the RadioShack Optimus CD-3400 CD player. The ad made Lars happy: "People are starting to talk like me," he chirped. "Yust you see. I am afraid you're going to change the language. I notice that Yohn Atkinson slips every now and then and throws a Y in there…
Description: Optimus CD-3400 single-bit portable CD player with four preset equalizer positions: flat, bass boost, treble boost, and bass boost + treble boost. Frequency response: 17Hz-20kHz, ±1dB. Dynamic range: 90dB. S/N ratio: 94dB. Separation: 77dB. Maximum line output level: 720mV. Power requirements: 6V, whether from four AA batteries or optional RadioShack #273-1655 AC adapter. Operating time (alkaline batteries): approximately 7.5 hours. Supplied accessories: line-out interconnect, carrying case.
Dimensions: 1½" (27mm) H by 5 1/8" (132mm) W by 5¾" (…
The Optimus CD-3400's maximum output voltage from its line outputs was very low, measuring just 720mV when reproducing a full-scale, 1kHz sinewave. This is nearly 9dB lower than the standard 2V output level, and, coupled with a measured output impedance of 1370 ohms across the band, suggests that the CD-3400 should not be used with a passive level control. The output impedance from the headphone jack was a much lower 15 ohms, but the maximum level (defined as 1% THD+noise) was still low at 900mV into 150 ohms.
Channel balance was an acceptable 0.11dB at…
I measured the effects of three jitter-reduction devices on a digital processor with the Meitner LIM Detector (see Vol.16 No.1, p.114), which looks at the jitter on the word clock driving the D/A converter chip—the point where jitter degrades sound quality. In previous measurements, I've found that the greater the S/PDIF jitter, the greater the word-clock jitter. Although using the LIM Detector to measure the effects of S/PDIF jitter-reduction devices appears to be a step removed from measuring the actual device, it may…
The solid trace in fig.10 is a high-resolution spectrum of the CD-3400's analog output made with the Miller Audio Research Jitter Analyzer several years after the Stereophile review was published. The player was decoding data representing a high-level 11.025kHz tone over which has been overlaid a low-frequency squarewave at the LSB level. The drive ran quite a bit slow, the absolute pitch being off by -651ppm, which explains Robert Harley's 1994 experience that the Audio Alchemy DTI•Pro was unable to lock to the CD-3400's S/PDIF signal.
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Can you hear me knocking?
Editor: It blows my mind that all of you talented people missed a major screw-up on the Radio Shack CD-3400 CD player.
If you play it through the headphone jack, you will notice a double clicking sound in the right channel during quiet passages. I would have let this go, attributing the fault to my falling asleep with the $9 "special" Radio Shack headphones in my ears and pulling the damn machine off my nightstand about a dozen times. Lo and behold, my buddy, (world-, or at least Bay Area-,…
Optimizing
Getting the best sound out of the Ayre D-1x meant dealing with…
The D-1x's strongest tonal suit was its exceptionally detailed and transparent midrange. Sinfonia Antartica features a multitude of woodwinds in the "Penguin" section of the second movement. The D-1x cleanly differentiated all of the instrumental colors, free of smearing or the sort of timbral indecision that some CD players exhibit with…