Canadian brand EMM Labs is best known for its high-end SACD players and professional D/A converters, such as the EMM Labs XDS1 we have for review here.
The company's owner, Ed Meitner, pioneered the use of DSD conversion, which was subsequently developed by Philips and Sony into a world standard.
He famously identified a key mechanism for sound quality degradation in digital systems, which he describes as phase jitter, for which he developed test instrumentation and which he documented in a key paper for the Journal of the Audio engineering Society. He also holds a number of patents in this area.
The first and only previous occasion we looked at an EMM Labs CD/SACD player, it was the one-box CDSA, clearly one of the finest available players of its kind. In fact, it was only bettered in the EMM Labs range by the two-box TSD1 SACD transport and the DAC2 D/A converter.
Anecdotally, this new model, also a single-box player, is a better performer than even the DAC2/TSD1, making it the range flagship.
The XDS1 is a two-channel only CD/SACD player which looks much like its predecessor, but there are important changes under the skin. The most prominent is a switch from the Philips-derived mechanism to one sourced from the esoteric division of Teac.
The original player was controlled by a native state machine, which is, in effect, a lowest common denominator control system, rather than a dedicated control micro processor. This was done for sound quality reasons in accordance with Meitner's thinking that the best way to design a player is to 'simplify and minimise'.
The state machine has been retained in the new player, which means that the control, system lacks certain niceties – there's only a rudimentary track time elapsed clock when playing, for example.
The older player was also rather slow to read the disc TOC and to find tracks, but the functional superiority of the esoteric mechanism, combined with state machine code means that start-up and track search times for the XDS1 are comparable to other more conventional players.
A great deal of attention has been paid to the analogue circuitry. for example, instead of the usual two or three stages of gain in the output section, the XDS1 has just one discrete class A gain stage from the DACC through to the output.
The new power supply has three levels of active filtering for each polarity of each channel and each stage of the dual-differential audio path. The XDS1 also employs hand-matched capacitors in its audio path.
Most digital players perform D/A conversion using a reconstruction filter with interpolation (oversampling) to smooth the analogue waveform, which works well in the analogue domain, but less so in the time domain where the tradeoff is pre and/or post ringing, depending on the filter design.
In the case of the XDS1, the proprietary MDAT processing is said to preserve phase, frequency and dynamic integrity, with no pre or post ringing.
Another proprietary technology replaces the usual phase lock loop with MFAST – Meitner Frequency Acquisition System Technology – which is said to lock onto any digital data.
Rather than attenuating jitter, EMM Labs claim is that MFAST completely strips jitter from the datastream.
Included in this player is a digital input which reclocks the incoming data locally to mitigate jitter imported from an external source. Digital inputs are available in Toslink and AES/EBU (balanced) form.
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