Got some money to burn and want to get the best (or close) when it comes to CD’s and SACD’s? Have a look at this (slightly over-)priced TEAC P-03 SACD player and D-03 DA convertor (but that’s just my opinion). This bunch will retail for 9300 EUR… per piece (so some simple math will tell you that the P-03 / B-03 bundle will cost a whopping 18600 EUR). They’re really aiming for mass volumes at TEAC with these babies!
You might say: oh well, that’s just 6 years of pocket money, but what will this amount of money give you? Well, you will get the BEST possible sound thanks to the DSD “Direct Stream Digital (DSD) Encoding” technology present on both devices. We have to admit though that we did not understand a word on the how and why of this technology and why it makes the devices so friggin’ expensive, so we’ll probably look like a bunch of morons on the audio-scene, but at least you got the info and the link to the TEAC site, so if you want to know more, click on and enjoy

“DSD is the technology used to record and produce audio content on the SACD. DSD is a 1-bit representation of the audio waveform with 2.8224Mhz of sampling. This allows SACD to achieve its unprecedented audio quality allowing it to reproduce audio better then any other digital or analog technology.

The main problem with standard PCM technology is that it requires both steep (brick wall) filters to block frequencies above 20kHz (specifically at 22.05kHz) which is difficult to build. It also requires the addition of re-quantization noise for its decimation (down-sampling) digital filters and interpolation (up-sampling) digital filters. These problems limit the actual fidelity of the reproduced audio.”