Pioneer PD-30AE CD Player
The DAC Pioneer is using begins to show signs of misbehaviour at –60dB (Graph 4) due to the lack of dithering of the test signal, but all the ‘grass’ is down below –120dB, which is excellent performance, and you can see the noise floor has dropped down below the –140dB graphing limit. The undithered signal at –91.24dB (Graph 5) is entirely dominated by odd harmonic distortion components, and the noise floor has dropped even further. Adding dither to the test signal (Graph 6) brings the level of the noise floor back up to –140dB (where it’s still lower than the noise floor of most amplifiers) and also totally removes the distortion components… exactly as dither is supposed to do.
IMD is not quite in the same league, as you can see from Graph 10 which shows
CCIF IMD using test signals at 19kHz and 20kHz, but it’s still excellent. There are sidebands at 18kHz and 21kHz, but both are more than 100dB down, and there is an unwanted signal regenerated at 1kHz, but it, too, is more than 100dB down… around –106dB (0.00050%) to be precise. There are some high-frequency IMD products around 25kHz that are around 70dB (0.03162%) down, and some more up around 40kHz that are more than 80dB (0.01%) down. All are too high in frequency and two low in level to be audible.
The Pioneer PD-30AE’s frequency response (Graph 8) is ruler flat out to 3kHz, after which it rises fractionally (0.01dB) then slowly falls from 14kHz to be 0.15dB down at 20kHz. Excellent performance indeed.
Channel separation was equally good, with Newport Test Labs measuring better than 100dB at low and midrange frequencies (108dB at 16Hz and 109dB at 1kHz) and 92dB at 20kHz. Inter-channel phase errors were vanishingly low, at around 0.02 degrees at low and midrange frequencies, and still only 0.41 degrees at 20kHz. Group delay results were typical for a modern oversampling commercial DAC, except that looking at the impulse and square wave spectrograms, the Pioneer PD-30AE doesn’t appear to be using oversampling to achieve its results. Channel balance was excellent at 0.01dB.
Newport Test Labs measured the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the Pioneer PD-30AE at 104dB unweighted, an excellent result that improved even further (to 107dB) with A-weighting applied. These are wideband figures. You can see from the noise floor on the spectrograms that across the audio band, noise was down at –140dB. Overall THD+N was not as good as I’ve seen, but still more than respectably-low at 0.067%.
The Pioneer PD-30AE has a de-emphasis circuit, as you can see from the tabulated results, and it’s a circuit that works extremely accurately, with just 0.001dB of error at 16Hz, 0.002dB of error at 4kHz and only 0.067dB of error at 16kHz. Of course most modern CDs aren’t pre-emphasised, so this circuit won’t switch on (it’s automatic), but if you have any CDs that are pre-emphasised (and they will be CDs that were pressed back in the 1980s), the Pioneer will play them back with the correct tonal balance.
Linearity errors were non-existent to extremely low at higher recorded levels, but very slightly high at very low recorded levels (down around –90dB), no matter whether or not the test signal was dithered.
The quality of the digital output from the Pioneer PD-30AE was extremely high, with very low levels of jitter and an almost-perfect frame rate. Eye-narrowing at zero cross was outstanding, but rather high at 200mV. This should not adversely affect the performance of any external DAC you might connect.
Power consumption during use was a little higher than I might have expected, but a 10.59-watt draw is not going to impact on your utility bill, even if you played the PD-30AE 24/7. In standby, it pulls less than half a watt, and therefore conforms to the Australian standard for standby power consumption…plus means you could happily leave the player in standby whenever you’re not using it.
Overall, the Pioneer PD-30AE CD player delivered outstandingly good performance on Newport Test Labs’ test bench, across the full gamut of tests performed. Steve Holding