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Dal sito:
http://www.audioenz.co.nz/2003/musical-fidelity_3-2.shtml
Musical Fidelity A3.2
Shiny machines
By Brent Burmester
September 2003
Musical Fidelity A3.2
CD Player and A3.2 Integrated Amplifier. $2999 each
It’s
standard practice to start any review of
Musical
Fidelity gear by making a jocular remark about how often the company
releases new products. I would never stoop so low.
Probably already obsolete by the time you read this, the A3.2 CD player
and integrated amp are reviewed here as a partnership, with additional
comment on their individual merits.
Out
of the box they make a striking design statement, although you may find
it an over-statement. The giant volume knob of the amp, and the
overwrought aluminium and chrome fascias are an acquired taste which,
against my will, I acquired. Both units are sturdy enough, but not built
to the standard their front panels would have you believe.
The
important business is going on inside these boxes, anyway. The A3.2 CD
features onboard upsampling from 44 to 96kHz, while the matching amp
deploys dual-mono circuit configuration. Given this information one
should expect a nice clean sound right up to the very highest
frequencies, with above average image presentation.
However, earlier mid-range Musical Fidelity equipment had a reputation
for making warm, rose-tinted noises, and this should be factored into
any pre-judgment of the combo’s performance. What did the listening
reveal?
Proof of the Pudding
Perhaps not surprisingly, auditioning found truth in both lines of
prediction. The A3.2 duo played with considerable panache, yielding a
finely detailed sound with notably snappy response to transient impulses
in the music. The somewhat over-lovely and over-blown character of
earlier Musical Fidelity stuff was absent, and the pairing’s
presentation could even seem a little on the cool side. Despite this,
there remained a hint of the old Musical Fidelity in the slightly
blunted and softened bass.
While
the combination produced a commendably transparent, neutral, and
engaging sound, testing each product individually highlighted certain
deviations from perfection that a prospective buyer should consider.
Upsample this
The
CD player, as noted, robbed a little bite from the bass. Its upsampling
feature makes a subtle but discernible difference, in the form of added
air and resolution in the treble without added edge to cymbal crashes,
violins, or over-driven guitar amps. The projected image was solid and
deep, but seemed a bit centre-bound in the lateral plane.
Rhythmic subtleties, such as the sometimes-buried contribution of
background percussion on Leftfield’s Leftism, were nicely
handled, and generally the player showed a deft hand at teasing out the
strands of complex musical passages. Always of great importance, the
reproduction of vocal textures was particularly good.
While
the A3.2 CD player provided a full-bodied presentation, a slight lack of
drive or urgency was also apparent. I found myself wondering whether the
price tag of the A3.2 CD was entirely justified by the sound quality,
and decided eventually that the aesthetics, ergonomics, and build
quality probably did enough to tip the scales in favour of
value-for-money.
Dal sito:
http://www.audio-components.de/seiten/ac/info/musicalfidelity/mf_a3_2_cd/mf_a3_2_cd.htm
Unpacking the four boxes revealed attractively styled matching
components. My wife commented favorably on the brushed aluminum front
panels; we had grown tired of a continuing parade of blah appearing dull
finished black components. These Musical Fidelity products are not their
most expensive units, but their more expensive line has some voids now,
until new models are released starting within a few months. They have
run out of the little known nuvistors and the "replacement" products
will feature the even rarer trivistor. A trivistor can be described as a
triode tube (miniature size) version of the nuvistors; both of these
tiny tubes are encased in metal not glass. Musical Fidelity believes
they have obtained what is possibly the world's stock of them,
approximately 25,000 units. As they did with their nuvistor components,
they will retain a spare set of trivistors for every product sold.
Enough news about the future; for the present I have on hand MF's CD
player A3.2, the A3.2 preamplifier and a pair of model M-250 power
amplifiers. Musical Fidelity also offers an attractively matching A3.2
FM tuner and an integrated A3.2 amplifier. I plan to present one review
each month and a final review of all of them used together at the same
time as a system. This month, their newly released A3.2 CD player steps
into the spotlight.
David Solomon, Vice-President Sales and Marketing for Musical Fidelity
USA products, had told me that these products needed a particularly long
break in time. I decided to break in all these Musical Fidelity
components at the same time. I had an extra pair of old, very old that
is, Siefert bookshelf loudspeakers sitting in the bookshelves in our
bedroom. So I hooked everything up to them and basically let all run
continuously for almost 300 hours (many with Purist Audio's excellent
System Enhancer Rev. B burn-in CD) before listening to MF's components,
one at a time substituted in my main system. Though I seldom do any
serious listening in my bedroom I want to mention that I had never heard
these Siefert loudspeakers sounding as good as they did with the entire
Musical Fidelity system feeding them; many years ago they had resided in
the built in bookshelves in my family room. This bodes well for other
bookshelf size loudspeakers used with the MF components. The Sieferts
with rather low efficiency manage to go lower than fifty Hertz, albeit
at a moderate listening level.
Let's Play Operation!
Inserting the attractively styled, with the appearance of a particularly
solidly built chassis/front panel, the Musical Fidelity A3.2 CD player
slid easily into place in my main system. It was approximately two
inches deeper than the last few CD or CD/DVD-A players I had reviewed,
but still less than fifteen inches deep. The installation guide/owners
manual is a model of its kind with particularly clear and detailed
diagrams and drawings of even the display area. The display area is a
rather brightly lit green display; the remote control has an on/off
button for it. The play button on the front panel also functions as a
pause control; push it once and the unit plays the CD, push again and
the unit is in a pause mode. In the pause mode the CD continues to spin,
but the track does not advance and the output is muted. Pressed again,
the unit continues to play from the spot where it had paused. If I have
not overlooked something, all the bells, whistles and other features of
the last few CD players I have reviewed, are on this unit or the remote
control. All are clearly explained in the accompanying booklet. If the
booklets for some of the Japanese based products were written half as
concisely and clearly as Musical Fidelity's, it would be a reason for
celebration.
I had just finished a number of listening sessions evaluating recordings
for this month's music reviews. That seemed like a good time to
substitute Musical Fidelity's A3.2 CD player for one of the other
players I had been using for those reviews. This done, I was now into my
equipment reviewing mode instead of the music reviewing mode; that is a
definite change in approach and attitude. Remember that I had put in
excess of 300 hours on this MF player before inserting it into my main
listening system. During the first few hours of listening, the same
general impressions kept floating through my mind. I had decided not to
continually go back and forth between players until later on in the
review process. These initial impressions remained beyond the first
evening of serious listening.
The MF player continued to give three areas of apparent difference
compared to the players preceding it. First, there was the added
fullness or richness over most of the bass range and it was definitely
not a relativity resultant of balance with the top end. It simply was a
particularly full and enveloping bass range. This even though the power
cord used with it was Kimber's Palladian PK 10 A.C., which uniquely
features the most solid and tightly controlled bass response of any A.C.
power cord that I have yet evaluated; in other words it does not add any
bass fullness or richness. The A3.2 player was doing it on its own.
Secondly, it was apparent that the high end and presence range were a
bit smoother than usual. Nothing was being added at any time to the
sense of brightness, frequency emphasis or harshness. A bit of the
opposite was true; on "typical" CDs any sense of edginess or harshness
in the treble range was seemingly reduced with the result that could be
described as a somewhat sweeter high end. There was not as much
difference with the newest offerings from companies such as Telarc as
with older CDs. Thirdly, everything led me to think of the MF A3.2
player as a music lover's player as contrasted to being an audiophile's
player.Most audiophiles tend to want or prize detail or detailing from
the insertion of a new component into their listening chain. In fact the
word hyperdetailing has been coined to describe excessive amounts of
detail. How can there be excessive detail you might ask? There is a fair
number of ways it can happen, starting with the recording engineer. Let
us assume that a given recording is essentially perfect, that enables us
to skip over some possible causal candidates. Now, starting with our "perfect"
recording, we substitute a new component. The new component has a
different tonal balance with a "leaner or tighter" bass range than the
original component that had a particularly full or rich bass range. That
extra output in the bass range affects what we hear. In addition to a
covering-up effect it tends to modulate other sounds in the mid
frequency range for example.
In addition, the tonal balance changes and even if the response in the
upper half of the audible range did not change, we perceive a change.
Call it a form of the "theory of relativity - audio division". So if the
component with the leaner (very lean) bass/lower mid range output is in
the sound producing chain the perceived sound is going to be relatively
brighter and more detail will be heard, whether musically related or
more revealing of flaws. If the musically related detail is noticeably
more than the recording engineer captured and got into the recording,
the result is referred to as "hyperdetailing". As a corollary, many old
timers in the audio field (yes, me included) believed or still believe
that a component that reveals more detail in a recording than another
component, without sounding brighter or leaner in the bass range is the
better piece of audio equipment.
Extensions In Listening
Extended listening sessions revealed that this fine Musical Fidelity A3.2
CD player is certainly not perfect but makes quite an effort toward that
goal for its relatively moderate price. The areas where it slightly errs
are a bit of added fullness in the mid and upper bass area and seemingly
an unrelated subtly diminished response in the upper two or two and a
half octaves. Here I do not feel on particularly firm ground. This MF
product features their highly touted version of upsampling (not
oversampling). What all might be happening, in addition to adding 8 bits
to the word length, changing 8 to 16 bits and upsampling to 96kHz, I do
not know. There can be some innovative filtering or contouring taking
place. In any event, Musical Fidelity claims to be smoothing, sweetening
and lowering distortions in the treble range. That appears to be true
for the most part from what I hear. Their similar A3.2 DAC offers a
choice of 96kHz or 192kHz upsampling. There is some debate as to whether
that should make an audible difference as it may not make a measurable
one. All this works out fine for most music lovers. Play one of your
older CDs such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett or
whoever and you'll be treated to a fuller sound with less irritation
from added harshness or digital edginess when you hear the singers hit
their high notes or with massed violins in the upper frequencies. Turn
that listening coin over and there will be some dissenters.Their
rebuttal, with many of the well recorded and produced newer discs, will
be something like, "yeah, but the bass sounds a bit overblown and
missing a bit of initial impact and the high end seems to be lacking
that last little bit of detail". In that infamous nutshell, there you
have it. You might find yourself on the horns of a dilemma. As with most
audio equipment, you cannot expect this Musical Fidelity A3.2 CD player
to be everything to everybody, but there's an excellent chance if you
are a music lover looking for a CD player in the $1K-$1.5K range that
this MF player may be the one for you.
Post Finale Addendum
After using only the fine Musical Fidelity A3.2 CD player for a couple
of weeks and becoming very used to it, as if it had become "my reference",
I did some intensive one on one comparative listening sessions. By now
the player had at least 400 if not 500 hours of use. All my above
comments remained basically unchanged in these wrap up sessions. The
bass range is definitely pleasantly elevated to a slight degree and just
far enough into the lower mid-range to add a bit of extra fullness to
baritone voices such as Frank Sinatra. In the high end, say on a typical
Sinatra CD or other early CD recordings, much of the common edginess or
harshness is definitely ameliorated. On top-notch current releases it is
also apparent that a touch of the leading edge or initial transients of
many instruments is slightly blunted. For example the right hand keys of
the piano are not reproduced with the sometimes almost startling
percussive impact of the sound of a live piano, same is true for the
almost bell-like sound of some notes. With the Musical Fidelity player
it is almost as if the pianist had an unusually light touch. Part of the
presence range is subtly recessed. Whatever, it still remains an
extremely musical sounding CD player. It is competitive with or better
than other solid-state choices in the range up to fifteen hundred
dollars.There is one or two tubed CD players that are very strong
competition at a slightly lower price point, but any tubed unit comes
with the caveat that you must hunt down some of the very best NOS (New,
Old-Stock) tubes to replace the factory supplied tubes to obtain that
level of performance. That adds to the price obviously and sometimes it
can be a bit of a tough search. As with many CD players the MF does not
play the outstanding, but rare, DAD discs such as by Classic Records.
The more common HDCD beautiful recordings by Reference Records are
reproduced with outstanding quality and beauty even though the A3.2 does
not list having the HDCD decoding chip. If true, then their upsampling
process does an admirable job on its own. I would like to repeat that
this is an extremely musical sounding player for music lovers that are
not trying to dissect all its areas of performance. Audiophile types
might look elsewhere for something that has a unique feature or a
certain area of excellent performance rather than overall musicality.As
I was finishing this review and listening sessions I was starting a
session with a new line of low cost interconnect and loudspeaker cables
by Harmonic Technology. One of those neat coincidences occurred. In
respect to tonal balance they apparently matched up very well in at
least that one respect with this MF player. Time constraints precluded
any extended evaluation unfortunately. As usual I ask that you take the
rating numbers listed below with at least a few grains of salt. If my
review has not described the audio qualities to your satisfaction, I've
not done my job and the numbers will probably not fill in any missing
gaps.
Il manuale:
http://www.musicalfidelity.com/manuals/archive/a32cd_it.pdf
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