Pioneer DV-373S (Part 1) Sound Quality CD Player?

I need to find a replacement of my CD player soon.

In this year, the first model of Sony Playstation SCPH-1002 is celebrating the 20 years old. This game console is become my CD player for a quite long time. The reason is simply because the sound quality using this Sony Playstation as a CD player is outstanding.

As time goes, the problem occurs especially for the CD optical and mechanism, resulting poor CD reading and skipping all the time. It is almost impossible to obtain new-old-stock optical replacement unit consider to it's ages. So right now I am thinking to replace this Sony Playstation as to the unit that more available in the market today. So I pick this used DVD player from Pioneer that I will use it as the CD player in my audio system.

My planning to use the DVD player in my audio system is because it still can play CD and it has digital/ SPDIF out. This digital out is a standard audio output but in digital format. This will going to the decent external DAC, digital analog converter for sound quality improvement compare to using on-board DAC in the mediocre DVD player like this.

As we all know that the key for the high quality sound is rely on the DAC unit, so using any player that have digital output can be improve the sound as long it connected to the external DAC.

I will not continue for this external DAC in this post. This will be my long term project. What I will share in this post is the DVD player for the CD player only.

I just bought this Pioneer DV-373S for only US$20 in a used condition. It is originally built in 2004 and still read the disc flawlessly.

Unfortunately when I received this unit, it has a dent on the back side. I asking to the seller about this dent and we both agree that the delivery courier is not handling the package properly. This unit got hard impact during the delivery.

I open the case to make sure everything is okay. The internal components still looking great, I don't see any damage on it.

Continue to inspecting this Pioneer DVD, it came with three separate PCB. One is for the main board, the other is for display and control and the last is the power supply unit.

The DAC using in this player is Burr-brown PCM1742. This is a multi channel, low end DAC, but find the DVD player like this using separate DAC is still exciting for me.

The other components such as the op-amp for the analog output is using multi purpose dual op-amp. This can be the bottle neck for the high quality analog audio signal from the DAC to the output.

The power supply in this unit, as expected from budget DVD player is using noisy switching power supply. This switching power supply is cheaper to built compares to the linear power supply.

Once I can assure this Pioneer DVD player is in the good condition, then I connect it to my audio system. I will comparing the sound quality with the Sony Playstation SCPH-1002 first before going deeper to the next upgrade or any external DAC project.

My initial impression with this Pioneer DV-373S is quite positive but cannot say this is a good sounding CD player.

The overall sound presentation is quite good, the frequency response is quite smooth. The bass presentation is more louder compare to the Sony Playstation, but the treble have some peaks which somehow sounds harsh to my ears. Overall sound quality is good enough but hard to compete with the smoothness of the Sony Playstation.

I will do some modification on the internal components of this Pioneer DV-373S. You can find the part 2 here

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