Stereophile – August 2019

110 August2019nstereophile.com

SONY DMP-Z1

measurements, continued

Z1 transcoding the CD data to DSD128. Even a mono

recording—“Please, Please, Please” from James Brown’s 20

All-Time Greatest Hits! (24/192 ALAC file, Polydor/Pono-

Music)—sounded a touch smoother with DSD upsampling.

Listening to music

In a nostalgic mood, I began my serious listening by using

Roon to bring up perhaps the best live album ever, Donny

Hathaway’s Live (24/192 FLAC, Atlantic/HDtracks). The

version of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” on this album,

with its loping rhythm, is definitive, and the combination

of the DMP-Z1 and AudioQuest NightHawks presented

Hathaway’s voice within the subtle club ambience to perfec-

tion. The sound was a touch too mellow—AudioQuest

headphones are balanced on the dark side of neutral—so I

switched to the Audeze LCD-Xes, connected with Nordost

Heimdall cables, for “The Ghetto.” The tremolo’d Wurlitzer

electric piano in this track’s intro floated even farther free

of the audience’s soul clapping, and the Sony propelled the

song’s iconic bass riff with hypnotic urgency.

The Hathaway album was released in 1972, as was an-

other album that had a huge effect on me that year: Stevie

Wonder’s Music of My Mind. Streaming this album’s opener,

“Love Having You Around,” from Qobuz (24/96 FLAC,

Motown), I was reminded that on this album Wonder

plays every instrument other than guitar and, on this track,

trombone, the latter courtesy of ace trombonist Art Baron.

The last trombone player Duke Ellington hired, Baron has

a connection with this magazine: He plays on the Jerome

Harris Quintet’s Rendezvous (CD, Stereophile STPH013-2),

which I recorded in 1998. Rendezvous is out of print, but one

track from it, Duke Ellington’s “The Mooche,” appears on

imaging. But it was close between that filter and the Slow
filter, both sounding less “shouty” than the Super Slow filter.
Differences between filters were more difficult to hear at
higher sample rates. With a needle drop of violinist David
Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg performing Beethoven’s Vi-
olin Sonata 10 in G, Op.96 (24/192 ALAC from LP, Wilson
Audiophile W-8315), the Short Delay Sharp filter sounded
slightly more relaxed than the Slow filter, with a somewhat
better sense of soundstage depth, even through headphones.
Low Dispersion Short Delay produced a somewhat lighter-
sounding piano in this recording, while Sharp emphasized
the percussive noise of the piano’s keys.
Robert Levine enthusiastically reviewed Japanese percus-
sionist Kuniko’s virtuosic performance of Steve Reich’s
Drumming (CD, Linn CKD 385) in the March 2019 issue
(p.115). A fan of both Kuniko and Reich—a live performance
in London of the composer’s minimalist Music for 18 Musi-
cians remains a vivid memory 35 years later—I purchased the
24/192 “Studio Master” FLAC files. The fourth and final
part of Drumming features repetitive patterns on marimba
and glockenspiel—the Super Slow filter emphasized the in-
strumental attacks, the glock sounding a touch “shiny.” Short
Delay Fast gave the best balance between the leading edges
of notes and the body of the tone.
I used Short Delay Fast for most of my listening, checking
out the other filters when I felt the sound of a familiar track
wasn’t quite what I’d expected. For classical orchestral music,
I most often used Low Dispersion Short Delay.
What about DSD Remastering? When I streamed from
Tidal Music for 18 Musicians, performed by the Steve Reich
Ensemble in 1978 (16/44.1 FLAC, ECM), the complex mu-
sical threads were a little easier to unravel with the DMP-

the second-order difference product

at 1kHz lay at an extremely low –106dB

(fig.10). With the relatively slow

ultrasonic rolloffs of the Slow and Short

Delay Slow filters, the aliased images

of the fundamental tones can be seen

at high levels (fig.11) but were much

lower in level with the Low Dispersion

Short Delay filter (not shown). They

are hardly suppressed at all with the

Super Slow filter (fig.12), and several

other aliasing products make appear-

ances in the audioband.

When I tested the Sony DMP-Z1 for

its rejection of word-clock jitter using

undithered, 16-bit J-Test data sourced

from both its USB input and its internal

storage, the odd-order harmonics of

the low-frequency, LSB-level square-

wave were all at the correct levels

(fig.13, sloping green line). Unlike some

other D/A processors I’ve recently

tested, the spectral spike that repre-

sents the high-level tone at one-fourth

the sample rate was very narrow at its

base, suggesting very low random low-

frequency jitter. This excellent jitter

rejection was repeated with 24-bit data

(not shown).

Sony’s DMP-Z1 turns in superb

measured performance, indicative of

equally superb analog and digital audio

engineering.—John Atkinson

Fig.11 Sony DMP-Z1, Slow filter, HF intermodulation

spectrum, DC–30kHz, 19+20kHz at 0dBFS into 600

ohms, 44.1kHz data (left channel blue, right red;

linear frequency scale).

Fig.12 Sony DMP-Z1, Super Slow filter, HF inter-

modulation spectrum, DC–30kHz, 19+20kHz at

0dBFS into 600 ohms, 44.1kHz data (left channel

blue, right red; linear frequency scale).

Fig.13 Sony DMP-Z1, Sharp filter, high-resolution

jitter spectrum of analog output signal, 11.025kHz

at –6dBFS, sampled at 44.1kHz with LSB toggled

at 229Hz: 16-bit data (left channel blue, right red).

Center frequency of trace, 11.025kHz; frequency

range, ±3.5kHz.

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