Nova Physics Memory Player
What I had read previously did not prepare me for this – the reviewers too something you have just experienced for the first time to someone who hasn’t yet experienced something. Like the first orgasm.
I have owned two of the most highly regarded digital front ends extant, the aforementioned) as well as the Forsell, Lector, Stibbert, Theta, Spectral and on and on. I have listened to almost all the others out there. The Memory Player is so different in its presentation that it is difficult for me to describe exactly what I hear. What I had read previously did not prepare me for this – the reviewers too conservative or maybe you just can’t understand by reading about it w/o hearing it. In fact I am sure that is true - because it is hard to
describe something you have just experienced for the first time to someone who hasn’t yet experienced something. Like the first orgasm.
Even CD’s that I could not tolerate listening too at my preferred listening level, or even much lower levels - such as Dave Matthews, Crash - which always sounds like a harsh discordant mixture of sounds- to wit : cacophonous -when all of the various instruments and sounds are played simultaneously.Heretofore I thought it was just a lousy recording – but it is somehow decongested – the original previously unrevealed integrity maintained.
It seems to me that all other CD playback somehow truncates the notes and voices to some small or large degree - the truncation somehow gets filled in with what then sounds unnatural, harsh, artificial - maybe that is what jitter is -Idon’t know. By way of analogy - One could speak the sentence “I am going to the store in one hour”- if that sentence were somehow morphed into beingmusic- it would have a flow to it, a naturalness – but to me normal CD digital sounds like someone saying “I go store hour”- basically we know what
the sentence is – but if it was music - it would be choppy, incomplete, robbed of some of the beauty that sounds and music convey. Now imagine six, eight, ten or more instruments all at the same time saying, “I go store hour”. Its seems that the normal CD playback creates the missing words with a substitute, and sometimes it does it better than others, or it doesn’t create the missing at all, and it is in those spaces, the missing words or missing parts of a note or voice- that the harshness, the fatigue, the sterility occur and more importantly some precious music, some magical quality is lost. I don’t know what the Memory Player does or how - but it allows for an unimpeded flow that seems devoid of artificial filler- it allows the precious parts, the clues that tell us we are listening to musicians and instruments played by them, to come through…
Virtually every CD I put into Memory Playback sounded considerably betterthan I had ever heard it before – surprisingly and particularly on those that I had found to be “poorly recorded”. Not that the good recordings weren’tbetter- they were - but the “poor ones “ were transformed to good….
But not now. Hence SACD and normal CD playback are no longer viableoptions. If I were making them – I would stop. This is not just a better CD player. It is a different experience.
Alan Eichenbaum
The Audio Tweakers (fomerly)
Scaena Loudspeaker Corporation