I have finally gotten THE SACD player! Sometimes called Universal Players.

Gentle reader,

I, no surprise to my wife Nancy, have bought and sold numerous "Universal Player" devices over the years. 

"What is a universal player?", you may ask. It is a disc player that plays most if not all of the formats that have been developed and sold that use the ubiquitous five inch plastic disc that first came out as a music CD. 

Other than music CDs they will play some of these: DVD video, DVD audio, Kodak Picture disc, CD video, HDCD and SACD. The latter stands for Super Audio Compact Disc and the former: Hybrid Digital Compatible Device. Of course there is also BluRay and the now defunct HD-DVD formats as well. This list doesn't include the multiple recordable versions of CDs and DVD that PCs use. Each type of disc uses a different size, type or color of laser to read their format.

It can be said that those five inch clear plastic disc with a layer of aluminum sandwiched inside has come along way since SONY and Philips co-invented it in the early 1980s. 

The CD or Compact Disc digital audio format is limited in it's audio range because they chose the 44.1KHz sampling frequency. Audible sound can be heard by most people from the very deep Bass which vibrates at 20 Hertz or cycles-per-second, to the upper most Treble that reaches 20,000 Hertz or 20KHz. I will not go into sampling rates and all the other technical mumbo-jumbo that the science involves. There are other web sites for that.

The "pits" in a CD which hold the ones and zeros of music or data are quite large compared to DVD and Blu-Ray discs. Those pits are TINY. So they can hold WAY MORE ones and zeros which allows for gorgeously detailed video and multi-channel sound all in that five inch piece of plastic.

Two camps, (three if you include the still-in-it's-infancy, Blu-Ray-Audio format) of audio engineers decided to try and improve the audio CD's sound. One group chose the DVD format and created DVD-Audio. The other camp, again SONY and Philips, chose the same sized disc with smaller pits but called it SACD. 

SONY won that format war with their SACD triumphing over DVD-Audio. Unlike their Betamax verses VHS video cassettes of LONG ago. Yet, aside from Classical music, most music labels do not make SACDs. DVD-Audio initially spread to many formats of music, then dwindled. I had bought exactly one: Henry Mancini's score to The Pink Panther film.

HDCD, unlike SACD and DVD-Audio, is not a separate format. It is encoded right into the music CD and all a player needs is the added HDCD chip inside to decode it. Players with the HDCD chip supposedly make all CDs sound better.

"What makes sound 'better'?", you ask? Well, I admit I do not have "golden ears" but I do detect a more robust sound, more realistic and a deeper and wider soundstage. Soundstage is the audible illusion of "seeing" the singers and musical instruments in their respective places on the stage. Also, good equipment will make sounds seem to be further to the right or left of the space where the speakers are. Also height can be expanded as well. I've experienced all of that. But then, I've been doing this for more than forty years.

One thing, most SACD discs are HYBRID, they have multiple layers. As mentioned the CD has large openings to their pits, so the SACD layer(s) are beneath them since the SACD laser beam is much smaller than the CD laser is.

What prompted me to bid on a newer version of the OPPO universal player was this SACD:

It is the most recently made SACD in my collection. Aaron Copland (pronounced cope-land) is one of my favorite composers and I have many dozens of his recordings by many orchestras over many decades and many formats. He was an American composer and one of the most successful and prolific.....I was going to type "of this Century", but it was the 20th Century he lived and composed in. 

What was different with this SACD is the player would pause at different places in the music, when there should not be any pauses. Very frustrating. But only this SACD.

I have had MANY players, as I said, sometimes re-buying the same model! The one I JUST replaced this week (first week of December, 2016) was an OPPO DV-970HD. OPPO is one of the most revered players for both video and audio quality AND some of the most affordable as well. Another reason I wanted to replace is it because it is silver and the front actually is a mirror. All that shininess in an otherwise black world of equipment bothered my OCD self. I'm only slightly OCD. Stop laughing, Nancy! She is too, but in different ways than I. So here is that OPPO:

You can see some of the formats printed on it. One thing that really BOTHERS me about the stickers than manufacturers put on their electronic products for display purposes that list the specs or features of those devices, when I see someone with a camera or whatever that STILL has the stickers on it, I want to go over there and remove them! OK, calm. I'm calm. For instance, the PC I am typing this on had all kinds of stickers on it's face when we got it. I removed all except the "Graphics by ATi", "Designed for Windows XP" and "AMD Sempron" stickers. They are designed to stay there. I upgraded this to Windows 7 and now 10. It's still going strong.

Here is what I am using now, it is an OPPO DV-981HD and as you can see, all black. The images don't look quite so good as the silver one because the sunlight in the listening room in the morning is indirect and the light in here is direct. The house faces East. 

One can barely see the blue light around the central button and blue display it has. 

While HDCD is not printed on this one, it does decode them. The two main differences is this one will up-scale DVDs to 1080P and it does not have analog component video outputs. Plus it does send SACD multi-channel output through HDMI. Something SONY doesn't like as they are afraid any digital output of SACD music means someone could copy SACD discs. But as far as I know, that is not possible since no one ever made a SACD recorder or blank discs.

Since I have your attention, I am loading one picture of each other player capable of playing SACDs that I have had over the years below:

Above and below are DENON DVD-2910 in silver and black.

 Above is a DENON DVD-2500 which I think is NOT a SACD player.

 Above is a DENON DVD-2800. HDCDs, yes, SACDs no.

 Above is another black DENON DVD-2910.

 And yet another black DENON DVD-2910 above.

  Above is another silver OPPO, but I can't quite read the model number. Possibly DV-971H.

 Another OPPO above, this a DV-970HD. It is missing the cover on the right front.

 Above, an OPPO DV-970H which does not do SACDs.

 Above is the first of the several SONY SACD five disc changers. Called SCD-CE775.

Another SONY, this one a SCD-CE595 with one of those STICKERS I told you about!

And the third and final of the same model SONY changer, another SCD-CE595.

A SAMSUNG universal player called DVD-HD950.

 The SONY above is also a 5-disc changer but for DVDs too. DVP-NC875V is the number. STICKER!

 Above another SONY DVD called: DVP-NC875V.

Another SONY DVD changer, but I can't read the model number. Different one, though.

Yet another SONY, a silver DVP-NS775V.

This SONY was a subject of a post back when I found it at Salvation Army. Got it for $7.95, I think. It cost well over $1,000 when new. BIG, HEAVY and EARLY called: DVP-S9000ES.

 Here's a change above, it is a TOSHIBA universal player called: SD-4960.

Believe it or not, the YAMAHA above is the last one! It is a model number: DVD-S2300MK2. Very nice one, too. Obscure yet very well regarded and no remotes to be found, but with my Logitech Harmony 650 programmable remote control, that is no problem.

In my defense, the vast majority of these were thrift store finds so not much outlay to get them. The big-name makers, SONY and Marantz and others make larger and much more expensive players and of course Blu-Ray players, as well. Yes, OPPO Blu-Ray players too have taken over. Which is why cast off DVD universal players can be had for a song. Or in reality a fraction of their original cost.

The OPPO DV-981HD played that Copland SACD without pause at all. So, $45.55 well spent and bought via eBay. Twenty-two players altogether. WHEW!

I stopped haunting thrift stores, flea markets and yard sales because I really love all the equipment I have in the listening room. Nancy is laughing again, I can feel it. But I really am happy with the sound. Took a lot of years and way more equipment than the 22 shown here to get there, but now I can simply enjoy the amazing sound of music played as well as I can afford.

Thanks for looking,

Scott