wualta
Orthodynamic Supremus
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2004
- Posts
- 4,596
- Likes
- 146
I felt really out of it when I found Panasonic had been selling receivers with digital amps using the Equibit technology (now called PurePath) from TI via a Danish company called Toccata for three years before I found out about them.
http://www.mm.hs-heilbronn.de/gruhle...bit%20risbo%22
http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/press/co...0/c00013.shtml
http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/t...h%20equibit%22
That's a lotta vias. Anyway, the receivers have aged enough to make them affordable on That Auction Site, so why not, how bad could it be, I grabbed a black SA-XR25. Well, lemme tell ya: it's purty cool.
Not literally cool, though. If you were expecting a bloodless pure-puritan-digital amp that runs stone cold, this isn't it. The unventilated (!) case actually gets pretty warm just with headphone listening. For laughs there's a tiny half-dollar-sized cooling fan on the back. It only comes on with continuous high-power use.
The XR25 (sometimes cited on HF as the XR-25) sounds very good indeed, very right there, almost in your face, very sharp-edged, no blurring or softening. Is it better than analog? Well, it's different. I can agree with the many who say it sounds cleaner, but only time and accumulated ear mileage will tell. One peculiarity is that the impedance of the load has, according to the scuttlebutt, the possibility of affecting the frequency response, although not in a major way. The SR-X Mk 3 sounds abso-stinkin'-lutely Kansas flat down to about 200 Hz, then it droops. I was running it with nearly max bass lift and about half that amount of treble droop. The low bass still wasn't there, but what was came over as rock solid (as did the midrange and treble), in a way only the SR-X can do.
That's through the speaker outputs. Plugging a Fostex T50 into the headphone jack revealed something strange: First, dead silence. Then, after pushing PLAY on my CD player (feeding the XR25 optically), there was a rush of hiss (BUT SEE BELOW), audible even on the fairly insensitive T50, even with the volume all the way down. Residual hiss, turned on by the presence of a source, on a digital amp fed digitally. What th--? Apparently this is a problem with these receivers, and until it's fixed or modded, an inline pad (aka volume control) for the headphone out will have to be purchased. But the sound! Best I've ever heard from a headphone output. If only that hiss could be squelched. The T50 really shines. It has plenty of solid bass. If it weren't for a treble spike around 10KHz, it would beat the SR-X for overall sound quality. Even the modded Yamaha YH-1 sounded great with a little treble and bass lift.
Does this mean the XR25 makes things sound... different? Could be. The Fostex T30, which had always been so mellow and bassy, turned slightly.. well, honky. Not at all what I'd been used to before.
The best I can say for the XR25 is that it puts you one step closer to the recording. Notice I didn't say music; this is not what some would call a "musical" amp. Instead, it tends to make CDs sound like what they are, recordings, with mics and preamps and EQ and reverb. Like any good piece of audio gear, it has quirks, and those will take awhile to sort out. I'll come back to this and report on further strangeness. Meanwhile, those of you who have one of the Panasonic receivers tell your stories.
http://www.mm.hs-heilbronn.de/gruhle...bit%20risbo%22
http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/press/co...0/c00013.shtml
http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/t...h%20equibit%22
That's a lotta vias. Anyway, the receivers have aged enough to make them affordable on That Auction Site, so why not, how bad could it be, I grabbed a black SA-XR25. Well, lemme tell ya: it's purty cool.
Not literally cool, though. If you were expecting a bloodless pure-puritan-digital amp that runs stone cold, this isn't it. The unventilated (!) case actually gets pretty warm just with headphone listening. For laughs there's a tiny half-dollar-sized cooling fan on the back. It only comes on with continuous high-power use.
The XR25 (sometimes cited on HF as the XR-25) sounds very good indeed, very right there, almost in your face, very sharp-edged, no blurring or softening. Is it better than analog? Well, it's different. I can agree with the many who say it sounds cleaner, but only time and accumulated ear mileage will tell. One peculiarity is that the impedance of the load has, according to the scuttlebutt, the possibility of affecting the frequency response, although not in a major way. The SR-X Mk 3 sounds abso-stinkin'-lutely Kansas flat down to about 200 Hz, then it droops. I was running it with nearly max bass lift and about half that amount of treble droop. The low bass still wasn't there, but what was came over as rock solid (as did the midrange and treble), in a way only the SR-X can do.
That's through the speaker outputs. Plugging a Fostex T50 into the headphone jack revealed something strange: First, dead silence. Then, after pushing PLAY on my CD player (feeding the XR25 optically), there was a rush of hiss (BUT SEE BELOW), audible even on the fairly insensitive T50, even with the volume all the way down. Residual hiss, turned on by the presence of a source, on a digital amp fed digitally. What th--? Apparently this is a problem with these receivers, and until it's fixed or modded, an inline pad (aka volume control) for the headphone out will have to be purchased. But the sound! Best I've ever heard from a headphone output. If only that hiss could be squelched. The T50 really shines. It has plenty of solid bass. If it weren't for a treble spike around 10KHz, it would beat the SR-X for overall sound quality. Even the modded Yamaha YH-1 sounded great with a little treble and bass lift.
Does this mean the XR25 makes things sound... different? Could be. The Fostex T30, which had always been so mellow and bassy, turned slightly.. well, honky. Not at all what I'd been used to before.
The best I can say for the XR25 is that it puts you one step closer to the recording. Notice I didn't say music; this is not what some would call a "musical" amp. Instead, it tends to make CDs sound like what they are, recordings, with mics and preamps and EQ and reverb. Like any good piece of audio gear, it has quirks, and those will take awhile to sort out. I'll come back to this and report on further strangeness. Meanwhile, those of you who have one of the Panasonic receivers tell your stories.
