Same familiar face, all new performance…
By Roy Gregory
If you own, even if you’ve only read about CH Precision products, you’ll probably be aware of the company’s “expandable, upgradable” design ethos – although when it comes to actual nuts and bolts, the realities of that approach and the available options it offers might just be a little more hazy. Words like “modular” and “card-cage construction” get bandied about, but what do they actually mean to end-users and are the supposed benefits real? Given the price of CH Precision’s products it’s a legitimate question. It’s also a question that the new D1.5 player/transport is perfectly placed to answer.
The first and most obvious thing about the 1 Series range is that out of ten different products, eight of them look almost identical. They all share the same casework and basic front-panel design. With the exception of the X1 power supply and T1 Time Reference clock (which simply don’t have that much to say for themselves) they all share the same high-definition, full-colour AMOLED display. Even the power amps are built into taller versions of the same chassis and also use the same display. Within that chassis, circuitry is modular, with individual circuit blocks transferable between different units that share functionality. Likewise, input cards are user selectable to match specific system requirements: so an end-user might choose to run a DAC with a single set of digital inputs and a pair of dual mono analogue outputs. He might add (or add later) a USB, a high-res streaming input or even a set of analogue inputs. Later still, he might choose to turn that one-box DAC into a three-box unit with separate left and right DAC chassis. He might also choose to add the SYNC-IO input for use with an external clock (like the aforementioned T1 Time Reference) or beef up the power supply with anything up to one X1 per box – potentially creating a nine-box digital front-end! But what’s really impressive is that you can take those steps without cost penalty or redundancy. It’s going to cost you exactly the same whether you buy nine boxes in one hit or get there one step at a time. And if you do take the gradual approach, you’ll be retaining every single bit of hardware along the way.
So, that covers the “expandable”. How about “upgradeable”? This is where some of the confusion arises. Add an X1 external power supply to an L1 line-stage or a C1 DAC and you’ll definitely be upgrading the musical performance. But that’s not what CH Precision mean when they refer to their products as “upgradeable”: and that’s where the D1.5 comes in…
The original D1 CD/SACD player was CH Precision’s first product, a unit that stayed in the range for over 10 years! It was also the first CH product that I ever reviewed – along with the matching C1 DAC. It was also a product about which I enjoyed very mixed feelings. Frankly, as a CD/SACD player its performance was flat and disappointing, lacking rhythmic fluidity and poise, dimensionality and tonal colour, while its price was stratospheric compared to the competition. In some respects I wasn’t surprised, as the D1 was built around the highly regarded and widely used TEAC/Esoteric VMK-5. At least, it was highly regarded by some. I never regarded the TEAC transport mechanism that highly – and other machines that also used it shared many of the same dynamically and rhythmically flaccid performance traits I heard from the D1. In my experience, the only people who managed to make that thing dance were Wadia – and they were one of the first to move on to (musically) greener pastures. Which made the transformation that occurred when you switched from using the D1 as a player to employing it as a transport to pair the C1 all the more surprising. In fact, at that time, the D1/C1 provided possibly the best SACD replay available, perhaps reflecting the performance of the proprietary CH LINK HD interface for native SACD data transfer, as well as the superiority of the C1’s decoding, especially once the PEtER spline algorithms were introduced.
What’s in a name…
Enter the D1.5: same chassis, same face-plate, same display window and therefore, not surprisingly, outwardly almost indistinguishable from its predecessor. Inside – that’s a different story. Inside it’s definitely all change, with a number of significant, performance critical features being revised or changed completely.
