EMM CDSA SE CD/SACD Player
EMM Labs has always been known for thinking outside the box. That thinking has produced several patents, dozens of innovations and countless plaudits from the consumers, professionals and critics who have listened to, and ultimately purchased, EMM’s products. So what was the next logical step for EMM? Putting all that thinking and technology inside one single, absolutely groundbreaking, box for you.
Introducing the EMM Labs CDSA SE CD/SACD Player. It’s a single-box, dual format player that doesn’t merely upsample CD audio to SACD, it upsamples to double the SACD standard sampling rate.
Pop a CD into the CDSA SE, in other words, and the player takes the 44.1kHz signal and upsamples it to 5.6448MHz. Making CDs, not surprisingly, sound remarkably like SACDs. This seemingly impossible task is made possible by EMM’s unique Meitner Digital Audio Translator (MDAT) signal processing technology.
MDAT is unlike anything the industry has seen or heard before. Here’s why: Rather than address the digital signal as a series of sine waves—as is standard convention—the MDAT-equipped CDSA SE processes (and upsamples CD audio to DSD for conversion to analog) by dynamically adapting to the transient nature of the musical signal. In this way, the CDSA SE is utterly unique and singularly able to preserve the phase, frequency and dynamic integrity of the original signal. Once you’ve heard this level of improvement in terms of resolution, nuance and dynamic shading, there’s no going back.
Another important development that distinguishes the CDSA SE from its competition is the world’s first and only discrete dual differential D-to-A conversion circuit. Rather than depend on mass-market, off-the-shelf converter chips—with all their inherent compromises and limitations—EMM developed its own proprietary conversion circuitry.
This is a monumental technical achievement. The sonic results are no less impressive. EMM’s new conversion circuitry is utterly free from the differential non-linearities present in every D/A chip created to date. The CDSA SE also features our new aerospace-grade composite laminate circuit boards. These provide several performance advantages over conventional boards:
- Copper traces are microscopically smooth on top and bottom, significantly reducing skin effect issues
- Naturally damped sandwich construction offers superior strength and vibration resistance
- Lower dielectric losses and superior heat conduction ensure a more uniform temperature gradient across the circuitry, increasing stability and longevity
All of this makes the CDSA SE the most innovative and sophisticated CD/SACD player ever created. These are things you can’t necessarily see. But they sure are easy to hear.