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Philips 963SA normal characteristics?

I just got a Philips 963SA. stock player

1. I think it sounds rather flat, like most Japanese equipments (think Philips is Japanese?). Even with the 192K upsampling it's flat, uninvolving, and not that much better than without upsampling. I'm a bit disappointed, especially with all the praises I've heard for this thing and the SACD 1000. Does this sound about right to others, comments, opinions please.

2. Is it normal for the disc loading to be so noisy. It makes some weird robotic cartoon-like noises be4 opening up and while loading
fireflydl

Showing 2 responses by fireflydl

fireflydl OP
2 posts
 
thanks a lot for the responses, confirms my personal observation and enlightments me on a few other things.

1. Can someone help me out with the details on the $30 mod, the where and how. I think this is a mod I can do myself?

2. I bought this player used, so I think what I'm hearing right now is how thing are supposed to be. Radknee and gregm, I'm tempted to say that "neutral" is a euphemism for this thing. As an analogy, this is like a color TV that's been turned down halfway to black and white; just really low in saturation of tonal colors. Although you're right, it does have detail, midrange, openness...I'm not sure how well I can adjust to listening to near black and white music. My brother has fairly high end equipments (American: Audio Research, Adcom) and those sounds characteristically shallow and low in tonal saturation too. I'd sort of promise myself to stay away from that "neutral" kind of sound.

You know it goes back to the basic philosophy of high-fidelity: the attempt to reproduce real life instrument. Well, there's a guy who lives in my neighborhood who occasionally plays his saxophone in a nearby garden, and when I walked past him, I had to tell myself, man, this (real life) is really nice and warm, full bodied... that this is the reason why I like music.

3 So, for the sub $400 range, what would be a nice, warm player? I heard a used Rega Planet is a good buy at this range. With it being British made, I think it should be warm, yes?
fireflydl OP
2 posts
 
Gregm and Mmrog, thanks a lot. So I'll give that mod a shot be4 blowing this thing off completely.

My other problem with this thing, is with the upsampling sounding a bit watery, unconvincing of real instruments. timbre different from unsampled, and is not even as convincing. Upsampling certainly has ovbious benefits of sounding more open, relaxed, and less digital, hard.

I had read somewhere concerning this that upsampling involves Digital Signal Processing, i.e. some kind of extrapolation process, which results in the lesser accuracy that's probably what I'm hearing. The same article said that hence, their company only doubles up to 88.2 kKz, as opposed to using DSP to extrapolate to 96 KHz or here, to 192 kHz.
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