Yamaha DVD-S1500 Review Manual

Manufacturer: Yamaha Electronics Corporation, 6660 Orangethorpe Avenue, Buena Park, CA 90620; 800/ 492-6242 Price: $450 Source: Manufacturer Loan Reviewer: Howard Ferstler. This review is a bit longer than usual (even for me), because it will deal not only with an SACD/DVD- A player but will also discuss the viability of those two technologies in general. Consider it as a combination player review and one of my regular Skeptima ...

hookup to a CD player input and a separate six-jack bank of connectors for multi-channel audio outputs. These output left, center, right, left-surround, right- surround, and subwoofer signals. The latter should be hooked up to the six-jack analog inputs of a suitable processor or receiver and normally they would carry the player’s decoded-to- analog SACD or DVD-A program material. These six jacks can al ...

I got similar results with SACD material and DVD-A sources often took even longer. One, Big Phat Band’s Swingin’ for the Fences (Silverline DVD-A 82002) took a full 35 seconds, because the player actually had to access two menus (automatically bypassing the first after pulling it up) before the disc started to play. It is not a great big deal, and probably involves the player’s ability to deal ...

zero out the DVD-S1500’s bass management with all SACD sources (remember, DVD-A is locked in with no bass management to begin with) and then get uniform bass management from all inputs, analog or digital: CD, DVD-A, SACD, DD, and DTS. The result is that a reviewer like me can not only enjoy the musical sounds of these new formats the way they were meant to be enjoyed, but can also do critical comparative listen ...

in my room) with the CD version is a credit to the Yamaha DSP technology. Of course, it is also possible that the master tapes were indeed configured for future surround-sound productions, and in that case the Yamaha DSP ambiance simulation processing looks even more impressive. I do have to make one point. Yes, with multi- channel materials that use the surround channels only for simulating hall ambian ...

think that most people will be thrilled with what this device can do. For one thing, it can be shoehorned into a squashed-down rack space that many other upscale players can only dream of achieving. Yes, it is expensive by Best-Buy budget player standards, but it is cheap compared to some other upscale units and it can almost certainly play SACD and DVD-A releases as well as any of them. Actually, it pr ...

That kind of weighting is applied by placing a filter before the noise meter. The filter is said to allow the measurement to better reflect how the ear perceives noise level changes, meaning less sensitivity at the high and low end. Weighting also makes DAC noise performance look better since some noise has been filtered away. However, it really has no application here, since a properly designed DAC ...

the value of the 40 dB in the fast mode. (Remember, decibels are in logs; hence a doubling in decibels is a 10x increase.) Maybe a teenage kid can hear it. The slow mode will make the ringing of the filter to an impulse look better in the time domain but at the cost of a potential audible effect, at least for teens. In addition I note that no scientific study has shown the ear is not sensitive to group- ...