At lunchtime today my Sugden Master Class Dac-4 arrived after a shorter wait than expected , more on that later .
A History , for my Fortieth Birthday my wife gave me a Rega Planet CD player, mostly because at the time you could not get new releases on Vinyl and when you requested an LP in our price I used to get sneered at by a spotty teenager . I'm not bitter I settled down to a life with little silver disks and bigger black ones . After a few years a second hand Rega Jupiter Io Transport and Dac came my way and a twenty year friendship developed between me and that fantastic Rega combination .
Earlier this year a CEC TL5 belt drive CD Transport caught my attention on E-bay and on reputation and reviews alone I bought it . Wow , the reviews were right . I've kind-of always felt that a lot of , good CD sound is to be found in the Transport . The Rega Planet and Jupiter Io overlapped , the Planet Io was a good improvement and an upgrade path Rega recommended at the time but the Jupiter Io combination was a bigger improvement than just adding a Io to a Planet .
So my CEC is doing all the right things timing pitch timbre etc all better and my Rega Io was keeping up and not at all letting the side down but I wanted more . I began researching Dacs . I did consider a Chinses Ladder Dac , Denafrips or even a Holo Audio Dac but was put off by my concerns over servicing and support . Has anyone thought about re-capping on of those . Finaly I settled on the Sugden again based on reputation , I started looking for one second hand , no chance , weeks grew into months , I spent a day phoning dealers , nobody had one then I found a dealer with one in stock , I phoned them
" Yep we have one in the warehouse " I pulled the trigger only to get an apologetic email telling me that when they got it out of the warehouse it was a Sugden ' something else ' !
I contacted Sugden , they told me there was a 27 week wait on orders , seems people had been ordering loads of Hi Fi during lockdown . Some more weeks passed and I decided to get on the waiting list I contacted Audio Affair because I had bought from them before and because they would take a 10% call it £200 deposit . Others wanted the full whack .
And after only about eight weeks they got it in, I had ordered a Stealth Black one and was not disappointed with its finish . What does it sound like , it has non-oversampling and no digital filters a bit old school just like my Rega Io I guess ( though trying to find out what's inside the Io remains a mystery ).
On first play I had to turn down the volume , I'm hearing more detail , midrange is slightly forward it does soundstage despite the best efforts of my Naim amps . Some interesting harmonising I was not aware of in the past on well known disks . But a bit bright , bass is restricted , possibly a bit of difficulty with those harmonics , then it accoutred to me . It's brand new out of the box , I'm second-hand Rosie , I've not bought a new piece of Electronics for over 10 years Turntable excluded . As the afternoon crept into the evening ,more and more disks were feed into the CEC and yes things improved and some parts of the performance may even have slipped but right now six hours and a Cheese and Onion Quiche , salad and half a bottle of Diet Fanta later its sounding bloody marvellous . Vocals are easier to understand and lyrics clearer , it times very well , notes are well formed and more interesting and the bass rumbles across the floor and jumps onto your lap like a chunky yellow eyed English Blue cat .
