Denon DCD-655 CD Player

The elements of interest are : Advanced Super Linear Converter (ASLC): Denon has often advertised the linearity of R2R BurrBrown DACs. There’s been an obvious very long term partnership between the two companies. The advanced version here refers to the colinear conversion of BurrBrown, first released in the PCM63 and reprised in the PCM1702 in use in that CD player. Selected BurrBrown PCM1702-L: one more proof of the partnership, Denon had the possibility to select DACs based on their own specs and they were labelled with an undocumented "L", on top of the standard "J" and "K" selected which were based on THD+N performances at various levels. I’ll talk more about this later. Sony KSS-213C laser head: the cheap but still very good and very fast KSS is in use here, as in so many mid-range CD players, sometimes even some higher end too. NPC SM5841A/B filtering: It is a 4x or 8x oversampling filter, which also provides digital filtering. I measured that it runs at 8x. It is relatively underperforming with an attenuation of 54dB and ripple of 0.03dB in the audio band, as in the NPC specifications (see the measurement report below). Pitch Control: it allows to change, by very precise steps of 0.1%, the reading speed. I’m sure what was the intended use.