Denon DCD-2500NE Super Audio CD Player
Australian Hi-Fi 29last to be doing so. Whether this policy will
continue under Sound United’s new owner-
ship remains to be seen.
In addition to playing back SACDs and
CDs, the DCD-2500 will also play back FLAC,
WAV, AIFF, ALAC, AAC and MP3 fi les that
have been recorded onto writable CDs. It will
also play back DSD fi les (2.8 MHz or 5.6 MHz)
that have been burned to DVD-R/RW. This
last should really come as no surprise: SACD
was the fi rst DSD format to come to market.
What did surprise me was why, since the
DCD-2500NE has all the internal processing
on-board required to decode these formats,
Denon didn’t see fi t to include either an
SPDIF or a USB input. Given that such inputs
have become almost de rigueur on nearly all
audio components these days, it seems like a
glaring oversight. By while the designers were
being blinded by that glare, it obviously also
blinded them to the fact that most players
of the DCD-2500’s calibre are fi tted with bal-
anced XLR outputs as well as unbalanced out-
puts. The lack of balanced outputs actually
doesn’t bother me that much, because techni-
cally there’s no real advantage in a consumer
product having a balanced output (though
I’d argue the exact opposite when it comes to
professional audio components), but many
potential buyers of the DCD-2500NE would
expect to see them—irrespective of their
usefulness—and there was certainly plenty of
room on the rear panel to include a set.
Appearances to the contrary, the DCD-
2500NE is not a slot loader, it just has a very,
very slim disc tray... so slim it seems almost
fragile when it’s in its open position. It’s a
lovely tray though, one that uses what De-
non calls an SVH (Suppress Vibration Hybrid)
mechanism, where the centre of gravity of
the drive mechanism is much lower than
in ordinary disc drives, which minimises
vibration during disc rotation. This means
the laser pickup gets a much cleaner signal,
so the laser servo’s operation is minimised.
I personally would never buy a player
of any sort that I could not operate from
the front panel, and could not therefore
recommend one that didn’t to readers, so I
am happy to be able to report that you won’t
need to fi nd the remote before you use the
Denon DCD-2500NE: all the controls you
need are right there on the front panel. How-
ever I would keep the remote out on a coffee
table or mantle-piece
to impress your friends,
because it’s beauty,
simply reeking of quality.
Even if you don’t want
to impress your friends
with the remote, you’ll
need to keep it handy to
access the DCD-2500NE’s
advanced transport
functions—program play,
repeat and random play.ADVANCED AL32
PROCESSING PLUS
Denon has been working on what it now
calls ‘Advanced AL32 Processing Plus’ circuit-
ry since ‘way back in 1972 when it ran into
quantization noise issues when building its
fi rst PCM recorder. To solve these, it devel-
oped an algorithm it called an adaptive line
pattern harmonized algorithm (ALPHA) to
reduce it, which it claimed ‘reproduces 16-bit
data with 24-bit quality’. In the intervening
years, Denon has taken advantage of techno-
logical improvements to tweak this technol-
ogy multiple times to be even more effective
and now says it can ‘reproduce 16-bit data with
32-bit quality.’ But rather more importantly,
it has optimised the fi lter algorithm so it can
detect whether an incoming music signal
is contiguous or transient and dynamically
adapt the decoding algorithm as appropriate.
A part of the processing involves up-scal-
ing the original 16-bit/44.1kHz signals to
32-bit/705.6kHz data.IN USE AND PERFORMANCE
The DCD-2500NE certainly seems to have
been optimised for use with SACDs, at least
so far as the transport is concerned, because
I was able to go from loading to playing an
SACD within fi fteen seconds, whereas going
from load to play on an ordinary CD took
almost thirty-three seconds. Eject times were
fairly similar: six seconds for a CD and fi ve
seconds for an SACD.As I have said in many previous reviews of
SACD players, one of the reasons for buying
an SACD player is that they seem to be able
to extract higher levels of performance from
ordinary CDs, and in the case of the DCD-
2500NE, thanks to its AL32 processing plus
circuitry, that was even more the case here. I
was particularly pleased that I was able to ex-
perience the Denon’s sound with a fabulous
album that I only just discovered, despite it
having been out for more than two years.
The album is ‘Songs from the Arc of Life’, on
which cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Kathryn
Stott play pieces they had frequently per-
formed together but not recorded together...
pieces they say map out a musical journey
through childhood, adolescence, young
adulthood, middle age and old age... hence
the album’s title.
The album starts with Ave Maria (Bach/
Gounod), probably one of the fi rst pieces any
child learns on the piano, and you can hear
the superiority of the sound immediately,
despite the limited range of the music being
played. The lower string sound of the Stein-
way piano is so rich and sonorous there’s no
way you could mistake it for a Fazioli, and
you can hear Yo Yo Ma’s faultless technique
as he stops the strings, always adding exactly
the right amount of vibrato to match the
note’s duration. I was bemused to fi nd I still
think of him as a ‘young’ musician, when
he’s now actually 61 years old. The second
track is the famous Brahms lullaby (Wiegen-
lied, Op. 49, No. 4) here arranged for cello
and piano (you know the one... ‘my baby is
sleeping’). Obviously both musicians’ talents
are severely under-utilised when playing this
work—to say the least!—but at least it’s kept
short, and we get to admire the sweetness of
Ma’s cello’s upper register.
The third track, Songs My Mother Taught Me,
despite its brevity, affords ample opportunity
for Ma to demonstrate his sensitive playing,
with the cello just singing the melody as if
it were a person, rather than an instrument.
Sublime! My favourite on this disc was un-
doubtedly Delius’ Romance for Cello and Piano,
a beautiful work and here beautifully played
and beautifully recorded. The sustain of the
lower strings on the cello is glorious and
the almost-syncopation between the piano
and the cello is heart-aching. The suspense
the two bring to the music is material for a
Masterclass.
My second favourite on this disc is a work
that I had never heard before, Il Bell’Antonio,Part of the AL32 processing
involves up-scaling the original
16-bit 44.1kHz signals up to
32-bit/705.6kHz data