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style ... chassis than the SCD-010, and no longer uses clock and sample-rate ...
CD player with S/PDIF and USB digital inputs Made by: Vitus Audio, AVA Group A/S, Denmark Supplied by: Kog Audio Ltd, UK Telephone: 024 7722 0650 Web: www.vitusaudio.com; www.kogaudio.com
CD PLAYER/USB DAC
Vitus Audio RCD-100 (£8800) Cool Scandinavian style and purist electronics design inside make this high-end player/DAC an enticing contender. Can it deliver sound to match that high price tag? Review: Steve Harris Lab: Paul Miller
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ack in 2003, Vitus Audio’s first products were its Reference Series RP-100 Phonostage and RL-100 Linestage, using battery power supplies. After that, Vitus went on to introduce its ambitious Signature Series, including balanced and unbalanced line preamplifiers, a phono stage, mono and stereo power amplifiers, and the SCD-010 CD player. This player used a Philips CDPro2LF drive, ‘stripped down to its basic mechanical and electronic parts and totally rebuilt,’ and was said to give a lower level of errors in reading the disc. Later, Vitus moved onwards and upwards with a no-holds-barred CD transport and DAC combination, the MP-T201 and MP-D201, in its Masterpiece series. But to provide a less costly option, Vitus also then revived its Reference Series, starting with the RI-100 integrated amplifier announced in 2010.
modified Philips CDPro drive, using a combination of different materials for damping purposes. There is no damping between the drive and the main chassis however, so the platform or support on which the unit is placed will have an impact on sound quality when playing CDs. Performance apart, those classy, understated looks will win most people over immediately. In this case the two fascia pieces are finished in a matte grey slate colour, which gives the impression of an almost grainless natural stone. This player is a completely manual top-loader. You slide the cover open, put on the disc and add the metal puck, fitted with six soft feet. As you move the lid through its last half-inch of travel to the closed position, a switch activates the transport and will start reading the CD’s Table of Contents, the display indication
entry level? Now, as a companion to that model, comes the RCD-100 CD player reviewed here. As far as Vitus is concerned, this is an entry level model, but from a UK viewpoint, it’s firmly in the category of audiophile exotica. But as you’d expect from a new high-end CD player in 2012, the RCD-100 also functions as a DAC. ‘The RCD-100 is designed as a DAC with a drive,’ says Hans Ole Vitus, ‘so even though we have spent a large portion of the budget on modifying the drive itself, we have spent most of our engineering on the digital and analogue stages of the player. As for the USB interface, we have also focused on sound quality, and hence this interface is not plug and play – drivers are needed.’ Inside, the RCD-100 has a simpler chassis than the SCD-010, and no longer uses clock and sample-rate modules from Anagram. But it is still based on a heavilyRIGHT: This top-loading player uses a Philips Pro CD drive, modified by Vitus. The USB input is optimised for high-resolution audio but PC users will need to download Vitus’s driver software
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changing from ‘Open’ to ‘Reading,’ then briefly showing the number of tracks. In fact, although that central glass panel runs almost the height of the fascia, the display itself only consists of a single line near the top, with the remote receiver ‘eye’ concealed in the centre and the elegant illuminated ‘VA’ logo providing a neat footnote below. It’s pretty minimalist, but it can indicate status and track times as well as menu functions.
button pushing Either side of the display are arrays of three buttons, which provide basic transport operations and also give access to the setup menu. In ‘normal’ mode, ie, when just playing a disc, you can use the bottom left button to come out of Standby, then press the top one for Play. If the disc is already loaded, it will take about 6 seconds
from pressing Play until the music starts. From closing the cover, it’s around 12. On the right, the buttons straightforwardly provide Stop, Next track and Previous track. However, to use the RCD-100 as a DAC, for example, you need to enter ‘Menu mode’ by pressing the middle left button. Then the buttons above and below become up and down keys to scroll through the menu choices, which appear in the display. Menu options include switching inputs and outputs, digital volume control and display brightness. Beautiful as they are, the buttons are rather small and are also recessed slightly. They’re fine if you have slim, artistic fingers, but less pleasing if your digits resemble bananas rather than bhindi [okra]. This would hardly matter if the player could be driven entirely from the remote control. But although the Philips RC5-based handset will give you all the transport functions, it doesn’t duplicate the menu controls. So to change inputs or outputs, you need to use the front panel controls, and switching from the CD drive input to USB input, for example, will take half a dozen keystrokes. Playing the old Hi-Fi News Test CDs revealed an unexpected quirk. The first HFN disc, put together by John Atkinson in 1985, has 64 tracks, but the RCD-100 was disinclined to play more than 20. Similarly,
with both Test Disc II and Test Disc III, which have 99 and 74 tracks respectively, the player would run up to track 20, but no further. The same thing happened with other test discs having 44 and 52 tracks. Fortunately, though, this wouldn’t affect music in normal use. I listened happily to compilation albums of up to 25 tracks with no problem.
big spaces Since the RCD-100 offers both balanced and unbalanced outputs, I first settled down to try both, using a CD copy of White EP from the Canadian duo Give [http//give. bandcamp.com, now only available as a download]. Playing the vibrantlyrecorded ‘Disappearing’ again and again, I found it nearly impossible to distinguish between the two modes. Which is probably as it should be, when using normal-length interconnects. Although the RCD-100 can’t play SACD, I enjoyed listening to the CD layer on Rebecca Pidgeon’s The Raven [Chesky SACD329]. On the opening ‘Kalerka’ the player seemed to bring out the mellow warmth in the vocal, rather than the sheen at the top, while the accompaniment rolled on nicely. It was particularly telling
ABOVE: Minimalist front-panel controls are combined with a single-line display to provide menu functions such as input/output selection and digital volume control setting
on the title track, where the singer’s lovely yearning vocal quality is so well counterpointed by the string group. With one of the several audiophile CD versions of Muddy Waters: Folk Singer [Discovery HDRCD 1001] the Vitus happily gave you the big space of the recording, as Muddy seemingly makes full use of the big echoey sound to create this recording’s unique atmosphere. And on ‘My Captain’ it was great to hear the interplay as the young Buddy Guy’s guitar accompanies and solos against the singer’s deepdown rhythm part on the lower strings. Later you can hear the roles reverse with Guy playing rhythm figures under the scarifying sound of Muddy’s bottleneck playing. Moving on to female vocal in a modern production, I put on Gwyneth Herbert’s Clangers And Mash [NaimEdge naimCD137]. On ‘Perfect Fit (Original)’ Gwyneth’s engaging vocal had warmth and intimacy; the handclaps were believable and catchy, while the ‘boingy’ bass drum had just the right weight and power. Actually the Vitus player did a great job on the album’s closing track, the plaintive unaccompanied vocal of ‘Midnight Oil’, especially in the final moments where you hear Gwyneth’s solitary footsteps crossing the stage and leaving the scene. For ‘Rolling In The Deep’ from Adele’s 21, the RCD-100 created a truly huge sound, powerful and clean too, and it stayed clean even as the sound built up to that chorus where it seems that everything is turned up to 11. Even the background vocals stayed clear and distinct, while the bass reached subterranean depths. Yet I
‘It created a truly huge sound, powerful and clean too’
THE VITUS TOUCH It was only after a long gestation period that Vitus Audio brought forth its audio firstborn. Its perfectionist designer, Hans Ole Vitus, started the company in early 1995, but spent eight years developing the products before he was satisfied with them. Hans Ole had got the hi-fi bug in his teens, modifying existing products and building his own, and he graduated in electronics in 1990. He’d also played drums in a rock band, but later came to enjoy all kinds of music. He joined Texas Instruments in 1998 as area sales manager for Denmark and Norway, and he says his six years with company gave him priceless experience of working with leading-edge technology. Today, the company comprises nine people, and is still growing, with future plans for an additional new brand under the same AVA Group umbrella. And Hans Ole still plays drums for fun…
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Lab report
CD PLAYER/USB DAC
VITUS AUDIO RCD-100 (£8800)
ABOVE: The RCD-100’s digital inputs cater for USB and S/PDIF, and there are balanced and unbalanced outputs. A Philips RC5-based remote control provides direct access transport functions
had the nagging feeling that some other players, perhaps less pristine and ‘correct,’ might actually convey that tension slightly better. Listening to Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section [Contemporary/ Original Jazz Classics] I found that the Vitus gave a very neutral, clean presentation of this great smallgroup recording. At the bottom end, you felt that Paul Chambers’ bass was full and rounded but with good definition, while in the midrange it captured Pepper’s complex saxophone sound, shifting moment by moment from confidence to an edgy nervousness – almost to hesitancy sometimes, before returning to magnificently powerful and fluid phrasing. Listening with a colleague to the first track ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To,’ we both laughed in delight at Philly Joe Jones’s incredible four-bar breaks. It was interesting to compare this with the same track played on a Naim CD3, which had an altogether more rough-hewn sound and yet also seemed to give an even zippier kind of impact to Philly Joe’s drumming.
radio streaming Fortunately, the RCD-100’s USB input is capable of handling 96kHz and 192kHz hi-res data. An impressive example was Dean Peer’s 2010 album Airborne [available in 24-bit/96kHz WAV form from www. deanpeer.com]. The mega-bassist’s incredible harmonics and huge sound came over really well. Then I spent a lot of time listening to Patrica Barber’s 1999 album Companion [Blue Note 7243 5 22963 2 3], recorded live on her home turf at the Green Mill in Chicago with an audibly appreciative audience. On Barber’s dynamically challenging version of Bill Withers’ ‘Use Me’ the RCD-100 gave the
full weight to Michael Arnopol’s bass, and highlighted the interplay between John McLean’s guitar and Barber’s voice. Naturally, I also turned to Radio 3’s HD internet streaming, first catching up with the Nash Ensemble at LSO St Luke’s, with the Haydn ‘Gypsy Rondo’ piano trio. With the Vitus DAC, the streamed audio certainly captured the sometimes almost glutinous acoustic of St Luke’s, while the detail and clarity of sound here made it intriguing to wonder about the occasional ‘noises off’ that could be heard. More important, though, there was a fine presentation of the instrumentalists, with the piano sounding full and rounded, while violin and cello were tangibly realistic. It was fascinating, thanks to the BBC iPlayer, to be able to contrast this sound with that of pianist Nikolai Lugansky in the Wigmore Hall, and with the Britten Sinfonia in the more artificial-sounding grandeur of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Then, with the Ulster and RTE Orchestras ‘together in the Ulster Hall’, playing Korngold and RimskyKorsakov, I was swept away.
If the core of this player is its Philips CDPro2LF mechanism, then its heart as an outboard converter is defined as much by VA’s use of Analogue Devices’ AD1955 DAC and TI’s SRC4192 upsampler. Via its balanced XLR’s, the RCD-100 delivers a full 4.1V from a low 73ohm source impedance, but it’s the DAC that helps achieve the ultra-low distortion – as low as 0.0002% over the top 10-15dB of its dynamic range – with true 24-bit inputs [see red infill, Graph 1 below]. The proprietary analogue stage is similarly robust, so distortion increases only marginally at the highest frequencies – 0.0005% up to 40kHz with 24-bit/96kHz inputs. The RCD-100 successfully decodes all inputs up to 24-bit/192kHz through both S/PDIF and USB inputs although, as we’ve seen with other (but not all) 3rdparty drivers, the A-wtd S/N ratio falls from 110dB via S/PDIF to 95.8dB via USB which suggests a 16-bit performance here. The responses via USB and S/PDIF are identical, however, stretching from –0.05dB/20kHz (44/48kFs), –0.9dB/45kHz (96kFs) to –4.3dB/90kHz (192kFs). Unusually, the bass end is tailored with a roll-off that reaches –0.75dB/20Hz but there’s no increase in output impedance to suggest this is a simple capacitor-coupled output. Of course, the huge >105dB stereo separation (20Hz-20kHz) indicates the RCD-100 has no ordinary analogue output stage. And the digital path is no less considered, with 16-bit/CD jitter as low as possible at 115psec, falling to
