Denon’s universal DVD player success kicked off with the
DVD-2900 which gave first rate DVD performance at the time and gave audio users
the chance to buy into the higher resolution formats SACD & DVD-A at a
lower price than offerings from Sony & Marantz (SACD) and Meridian (DVD-A).
The DVD-2900 was not all about bells and whistles without any clout; CD replay
was comparable to £400.00 CD only players of the time.
Two
generations later the DVD-3930 sees DVD performance come of age, and with
Blu-Ray and HD DVD on the horizon the £839.00 investment is probably going to
being as good as it gets for DVD without spending a very hefty sum.
Buyers of the 3930
are unlikely to ignore its CD & SACD and Denon have gone to some effort to
improve the 2-channel audio circuitry over its predecessor, the 3910. Take the
power supply for example, gone is the shared Switch Mode Power Supply (SMPS)
with the video circuits in favour of a dedicated linear power supply solely for
2-channel audio. This idea has stemmed from one of Denon’s older and more
costly stable mates the Denon DVD-A1XVA and while not of the same standard is a
step in the right direction. Similarly, the audio board uses the latest
high-accuracy 24-bit/192-kHz D/A converter for the audio DAC in dual
differential configuration.
What does all this
equate to in terms of sound? The playback from CD is open, fresh and expressive
with a good level of detail retrieval. Bass has good weight, punch and
respectable timing and the stereo image is impressively focused. The CD quality
begs to be compared with a CD only player of similar price. Take the British
mid-price manufacturer Arcam and listen to the CD192 and you here where the
Denon is limited with Redbook CD, the Arcam manages deeper, tauter bass lines,
a more realistic sense of acoustic space allied with finer detail, tonal
nuances. Neither player sounds forcefully aggressive or edgy but the DVD-3930
is more tonally etched and artificial.
All that
Glitters...
The 3930 has the
makings for a serious Red Book CD player, but in its OEM guise they are some
serious weaknesses which prevent it from getting there. Working backwards from
the 2-channel audio board, it gets off to an excellent start with Burr Brown
D/A converters which quickly spirals downwards with "jellybean"
op-amps for I/V converter, filtering and buffer stages. Likewise the master
clock oscillator is embedded in an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated
Circuit), a pierce oscillator which consists of a "gate", the output
of this gate provides the square wave (clock signal). The pierce oscillator is
highly unstable and very noisy which = jitter.
The digital and analogue
blocks of circuitry in the 3920 are all powered from their own regulated power
supplies using the industry standard 7805, 7812 & 7912 voltage regulators.
The 78 series regulators are renowned for being noisy, with average PSSR of
approx. 80db at low frequencies which worsen considerably as frequency
increases. These conventional regulators do not react fast enough to
(bandwidth) load variations resulting in slow transient response.
