Musical Fidelity gives SACD the blue light

[Σπύρος Μπλάτσιος]

With a retail price of £3999, the appearance of the new kW Super Audio CD player from Musical Fidelity demonstrates the level of the company’s commitment to the SACD format – but it also promises absolutely top-level sound quality from standard CDs.
In search of superlative SACD performance, the kW SACD features a dual-layer choke regulation system that, the company claims, reduces power supply noise to almost zero – and, as it says, a better noise ratio leads to better dynamic range, which in turn leads to better resolution. The kW SACD is instantly switchable between Class A tube and Class A transistor output stages; the power supply is immune from high-frequency noise and the SACD and CD paths are also entirely separate, each having its own choke-regulated power supply, DAC and filter, optimally tuned for each format.
When it comes to CD playback, Musical Fidelity says the kW SACD offers ‘a beautiful soft clarity which is sort of like analogue but has much greater detail without the usual harshness associated with digital’. The kW SACD uses the latest and best DACs in dual-differential mode, upsampling to 24-bit at 192kHz. In tests, the company has achieved a laudable noise ratio of 121dB and a level of jitter that seems no higher than the reading you’d get from the jitter test equipment itself (and Musical Fidelity says it will gladly reproduce these results personally for visitors to its factory).
The company is aiming for a better reliability rate than with the Tri-Vista, its first venture into SACD players, and the kW SACD player offers one added temptation: upon switch-on the feet glow red, then fade to amber when the output stage is switched on, and finally – after about 45 minutes, when warm-up is complete – they turn a rather fetching shade of blue.
Musical Fidelity, 020 8900 2866
www.musical-fidelity.co.uk

από το hifinews.co.uk