''Mission DAD 7000 is an attractively small-dimensioned machine, being essentially the CD 104 with Mission's grey/black decor. It has adequate rather than exotic control features, but the advantages of the Philips oversampling technique and digital filters. Mission claim to have introduced new electronic features, described at length in a booklet and a copy of their Patent Application which they let me have. In essence, they have directed their energies at eliminating the spurious supersonic harmonic signals generated as part of the digital-to-analogue conversion process and the mandatory low-pass filters which follow it. The extent to which these by-product tones in CD reproduction affect the sounds we hear, perhaps through the generation of intermodulation components down into the audio band, has never been scientifically established.''
''So an additional low-pass filter and delay sequence has definitely been included, reducing HF components at the sampling frequency and its harmonics by a kind of combfilter cancellations effect. This is said to have been achieved "without adversely affecting the phase linearity of the audio band". However, a plan to incorporate full 16-bit D-A converters has been postponed, and so the machine is in fact 14-bit, though the Philips oversampling arraneement has already been proved to perform pretty well up to 16-bit standards.'' JOHN BORWICK.
SPECIFICATION
Frequency response: 5 - 20,000 Hz ±0.3 dB
Total harmonic distortion: 0.005%
Signal-to-noise ratio: 90dB
Channel separation: 90dB
Output: 2V fixed
Dimensions (W x H x D): 320 x 87 x 298 mm
Weight: 7 kg
There was a secret in the industry and that was these Mission players that sold for $750.00 USD in high end specialty shops were identical in every way to the $159.00 Philips CD104, even the same fixed cables as the 104. The only difference was a black sealed box at the output of the Mission player. Other than that if you put them side by side, they were identical. They sold like crazy in the mid-eighties, the Studer Revox player at $1350.00 was its only real competition in the states, possibly a Meridian(?) was another but were considerably more.
ReplyDeleteThe secret was when you listened to the DAD7000 and CD104 side by side, the $159.00 104 sounded much better; more lively, dynamic, just better. I worked in a specialty audio shop at the time and when a friend loaned me his cheaper machine, I brought it into the shop. Once the owner heard it he told the sales staff not to mention, talk about it if a customer asked. The difference wasn't subtle. Anyone could hear the diff.