Vintage

Although its casework and disposition of buttons, etc, is distinctly ‘Marantz’, the CD-94 has as its donor chassis the CD960 [HFN Jul ’20] from one-time parent brand Philips. The CD960’s family tree may be traced back to Philips’ CD450 [HFN Aug ’14], launched a couple of years earlier, with all related players employing the classic SAA7220 4x oversampling filter and two-channel TDA1541 16-bit DAC. The Marantz CD-94 and Philips CD960 use the superior CDM-1 transport and ‘A’ version of the DAC but there are differences in their respective analogue output stages – the CD960 has a 2.29V maximum output (re. 1kHz/0dBFs) with a wide 109.9dB A-wtd S/N ratio while the CD-94 has a reduced 1.98V output (albeit far closer to the 2V standard) and 108.2dB S/N ratio. Distortion, however, is lower in the CD-94 through the midband (1kHz/0dBFs) with figures reduced from 0.0004% (CD960) to 0.00015% even though there’s an increase from 0.00065% at 20kHz/0dBFs to 0.0012% in the CD-94.

However, the general trend of distortion versus level, with its ‘steps’ at –40dB and –60dBFs [see Graph 1, below], is very similar to that seen with the CD960 and CD450 and, indeed, the plethora of other players based on this once-ubiquitous 16-bit DAC. Clearly, the SAA7220/TDA1541 chipset lacks the uniformity of modern DAC solutions, as also evidenced by its –3dB offset in linearity at just –90dBFs. Furthermore, the linear-phase 4x digital filter has only a moderate tap-count, offering a modest 41dB rejection of stopband images albeit with, for the era, a very fine ±0.03dB response ripple [see Graph 2, below]. Overall, the CD-94’s frequency response is flatter than that achieved by the CD960 at +0.02dB/–0.05dB (re. 20Hz-20kHz) while digital jitter is comparable at 165psec. PM