''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