Stereophile – August 2019

108 August2019nstereophile.com

SONY DMP-Z1

measurements, continued

AudioQuest NightHawk headphones, though it did help

with the high-impedance Sennheiser HD 650s.

As the Sony has two slots for microSD cards, I first tried

to play familiar music files stored on two cards I’d been

using with my PonoPlayer: a 16GB PNY and a 64GB

SanDisk Ultra Plus. However, the DMP-Z1 couldn’t find

the files on these cards. When I looked at the manual to see

what I was doing wrong, I found this: “Use a microSD card

that has been formatted on the player. Sony does not guar-

antee the operation of other microSD cards.” I reformatted

the cards with the DMP-Z1—it uses the FAT32 file sys-

tem—and recopied the music files to them from my laptop.

Still no joy. Farther down the relevant page of the manual

it says, “Sony does not guarantee the operation of all types

of compatible microSD cards with the player.” Perhaps that

was the problem.

I unmounted the cards and began using both the music

that had been included in the DMP-Z1’s internal storage

and files I copied to the DMP-Z1 from my Mac mini via

USB. I also connected the Sony’s USB port to a port on my

Roon Nucleus+ server and selected “USB DAC” on the

touchscreen. Roon 1.6 running on my iPad mini recognized

the Sony as “Player (ALSA),” and once I’d enabled it as a

playback zone, with DSD data transmitted as DoP, and de-

fined the DMP-Z1 as an MQA decoder and/or renderer, I

could stream music to it from the Nucleus’s internal storage.

In USB DAC mode, the DMP-Z1’s display shows a bar-

graph level meter for each channel, as well as the sample

rate of the incoming data. With Roon performing the first

or both unfoldings of MQA-encoded, 192kHz-sampled

data, the Sony peculiarly displayed, respectively, “PCM

96kHz” or “PCM 48kHz.” The display correctly showed

the sample rate with linear PCM or DSD data in USB

bottom right of the touchscreen, then Output Settings and
DAC Filtering Selection. When a different filter is chosen,
the player mutes for a few seconds as the new filter coef-
ficients are loaded, then resumes play.
The DMP-Z1 offers a variety of DSP functions: a 10-
band graphic equalizer; bass, midrange, and treble tone
controls; DSEE HX, which upsamples lossy-compressed and
CD-definition data; DSD Remastering, which transcodes
PCM data to 5.6MHz DSD; a Dynamic Normalizer, which
minimizes loudness differences for different tracks; and a
Vinyl Processor—this last said to produce “rich sound that is
close to the playback from a vinyl record on a turntable.” As
well as a standard setting, Vinyl Processor can be custom-
ized with adjustments for surface noise, tonearm resonance,
and turntable resonance. Purists like me can bypass all these
options, other than DSD Remastering, by selecting “Direct
Source (Direct).” For playback of DSD files there are two
ultrasonic-rolloff filter options and gain settings of 0 and
–3dB, the latter recommended to avoid clipping.
The headphone outputs use high-performance Texas In-
struments TPA6120A2 chips, which I last saw in Music Hall’s
ph25.2 headphone amplifier, reviewed by Sam Tellig in May

2010. The internal wiring is all sourced from Kimber Kable.

Setup
I don’t have headphones fitted with Sony’s Balanced-
Standard TRRS jack plug, so for my auditioning I used
the 3.5mm stereo output jack. When you plug in a pair of
headphones, the DMP-Z1 mutes and an orange light on its
top panel illuminates. The player is unmuted by turning the
Volume knob to its minimum position and back again, or by
waiting a few seconds. I didn’t need to use the player’s High
Gain mode with the low-impedance Audeze LCD-X and

Slow filter was an extremely short

linear-phase type (fig.3). The Super

Slow filter had a time-perfect impulse

response with no pre- or postringing

(not shown).

With white noise sampled at

44.1kHz, the Sony’s output with

the Sharp and Short Delay Sharp

reconstruction filters rolled off

above 20kHz (fig.4, magenta and

red traces), reaching full stop-band

attenuation at 24kHz. The aliased im-

age of a 19.1kHz tone at 0dBFS (cyan,

blue) was suppressed by 101dB, and

the second and third harmonics of

this tone lay below –90dB (0.003%).

With the Low Dispersion Short

filter, the ultrasonic output rolled off

slightly less quickly (not shown), with

the aliased tone suppressed by 44dB.

The Slow and Short Delay Slow filters

behaved identically in the frequency

domain, with a rolloff that starts in

the top audio octave, lies at –3dB at

18kHz, but doesn’t reach full attenu-

ation until 38kHz (fig.5, magenta and

red traces). The aliased tone at 25kHz

is suppressed by just 12dB with this

filter. The Super Slow filter rolls off

very slowly, with the response down

Fig.5 Sony DMP-Z1, Slow filter, wideband spectrum

of white noise at –4dBFS (left channel red, right

magenta) and 19.1kHz tone at 0dBFS (left blue,

right cyan), with data sampled at 44.1kHz (20dB/

vertical div.).

Fig.6 Sony DMP-Z1, Super Slow filter, wideband

spectrum of white noise at –4dBFS (left channel

red, right magenta) and 19.1kHz tone at 0dBFS (left

blue, right cyan), with data sampled at 44.1kHz

(20dB/vertical div.).

Fig.7 Sony DMP-Z1, spectrum with noise and spur-

iae of dithered 1kHz tone at –90dBFS with: 16-bit

data (left channel cyan, right magenta), 24-bit data

(left blue, right red) (20dB/vertical div.).

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