Soulution 746+ SACD

The soulution 746+ is the ultimate CD/SACD-Player for music lovers with highest expectations regarding musicality and precision of the music reproduction. The excellent 746 player unit gets comined with an ultimate, much more powerful external power supply and thus forms the 746+ SACD-Player. The anyway outstanding sonic qualities of the 746 player unit get emphasised even further. Much more than just a CD/SACD player it bridges the gap between the digital and the analogue worlds. Production of this unique SACD-Player is limited to 20 units.

Highlights

Philosophy
A CD or SACD player brings both digital and analogue domains into an audio system. For the very highest quality sound every part of the player is critical. A high-quality D/A converter alone is no longer enough. The 746 unites a top quality optical drive, a super-precise master clock generator, an intelligent digital signal processor with over­sampling, and analogue output stages of the utmost quality. Together they ensure nothing in the music is lost on its way from disc to output connection.

Design
Look inside many CD/SACD players and you’ll find a lot of empty space and off the shelf electronics. soulution’s approach is somewhat different. As with our other components we’ve engineered our own circuitry and used a consistent dual mono layout throughout. Three separate power supplies – for drive, digital and analogue stages – are moved offboard into an external housing, removing a potential source of interference.

Transport
Drive quality is critical in a high-end player. For the 746 we chose the Esoteric synchromesh drive from Teac. It is mounted to massive copper chassis which are in turn affixed with damped mountings for complete mechanical isolation.

Upsampling
Audio data from the disc is buffered. A powerful SHARC DSP performs the 8x over­sampling to 24 bit /352.8 kHz (24 bit/384 kHz depending on the digital input signal) with the utmost precision. We believe precision of inter­polation is more important than high clock rates. Our players use an algorithm from the highly regarded Anagram Technologies followed by Burr Brown D/A converters in a digital symmetric configuration. For SACD only, conversion to PCM is used prior to D/A conversion. The PCM format allows us to use innovative processes like the Zero Phase Technology.

zeroφtech
The 746 SACD-Player is equipped with soulution’s innovative Zero-Phase-Technology. Smallest timing errors provoked by the analog low pass filter of the D/A converter get eliminated. Every D/A-converter requires an analog low pass filter in its output in order to suppress high frequency noise and aliasing signals. The 3rd order bessel filter , used for the 746 SACD-Player, with a cut-off frequency of 120kHz, does show a phase shift of up to 15° in the audio band. Due to the Zero-Phase-Technology the phase error of the analog music signal remains below 1°, 20 Hz – 100kHz! The Zero-Phase-Technology brings you even closer to the beauty of the source material! The 746 SACD-Player is equipped with soulution’s innovative Zero-Phase-Technology. Smallest timing errors provoked by the analog low pass filter of the D/A converter get eliminated. The music gets even more realistic and 3-dimensional with a lot of “air” around instruments and voices. As close to the source as possible! No detail gets lost.

D/A converter and output stage
Burr-Brown devices perform D/A conversion only. Their internal upsamling and filter functions are by-passed. They run in dual-mono mode. The four output currents are converted to voltage and then filtered. With an internal bandwidth of 80 MHz, this current/voltage conversion stage allows best signal-to-noise performance and maximum dynamics in the analogue domain.

Output stage
The 746’s extremely wideband output stage is identical to that of the 720 reference preamplifier, including the power supply. A 40 MHz/– 3 dB bandwidth ensures every musical detail is reproduced true to life producing a three-dimensional, spatial sound. Output signal levels are enough to keep interconnect influences to an absolute minimum.

Clock
No less impressive is the master clock generator which provides an ultra-precise clock signal. Residual jitter at below one picosecond is effectively undetectable with current test equipment.

External power supply
The external power supply consists of three separate and electrically isolated sections, all complemented by multi-state filter network which keeps mutual inter­ference across the three to a minimum. Key to any good sounding audio component is a stable and noise-free power supply – especially for the audio stages. For powering the analog stages an innovative, amplifier-like circuit design is used, providing an extremely stable supply voltage with ripple levels below 0.01 µV. With more than 500’000 µFarad of storage capacitance it provides almost unlimited impulse current for the analog circuits. Bus bars supply this power throughout the unit without loss. A unique concept in the audio world, this allows the same high quality supply to be delivered to all parts of the 746+.