Rob Adelman wrote:
William Sommerwerck wrote:

Oddly, the first CD player with any wide acceptance among anti-digital
audiophiles was a not-very-expensive Yamaha.

Was that the natural sound series? I had a cassette deck and a tuner
from this series.

Yamaha basically introduced the first sigma-delta converters, using
their "bitstream" chips. Unfortunately they didn't have the idle tone
problems solved at that point and some of the whistles drove people up
the wall, but it was clear that they sounded generally a whole lot better
than the second-generation Philips 16-bit ladder DAC chipsets.

On the other hand, the Yamaha AES/EBU interface chip set is responsible
for a lot of the misconceptions about jitter that permeate the audiophile
community these days. Lots of folks built devices with converters that
didn't reclock and which used the internal PLL on the Yamaha chip to derive
a nasty jitter-laden clock from the input signal. All -kinds- of things would
change the sound on the output, even cable length. Not good.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."