I’m amused by Wall Street analysts who refer to Pioneer as “a Japanese audio company.” Sure, it’s that, but Pioneer was also among the first to acknowledge the importance of high-quality video as well and to foresee their joining together as “home theater.” Today, Pioneer is as much renowned for its projection TVs as for its audio products. Arid, while others dallied with VCRs of marginal quality, Pioneer championed high-resolution laserdisc players, even producing the only DVD players with laserdisc compatibility. So it’s no surprise to find Pioneer again leading the way with the Elite DV-09, the world’s first DVD player with Home THX certification (a subject in and of itself—See “THX Meets DVD” in this issue). For the purposes of this review, let’s just say that it extends Home THX audio certification into the video realm and that DVD players carrying the THX logo are expected to meet Lucas- film’s criteria for video performance, audio performance, and ease of use.
You can’t help but be impressed by the Pioneer Elite DV-09 as soon as you lift it out of the box. It’s heavy—almost 35 pounds, four or five times more than run- of-the-mill players. Its high-gloss front and side panels (typical of Pioneer’s Elite line) fairly scream quality, as do the tasteful gold- on-black Pioneer and THX medallions adorning the front panel. (Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the garish red DTS logo sticker, which I hope will be replaced by something more appropriate before this player actually hits dealers’ shelves.)
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Dimensions: 18½ in. W x 5¾ in. H x 14 in. D (46 cm x 14.4 cm x 37cm).
Weight: 34.8 lbs. (15.8 kg).
Price: $2,000.
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Although the DV-09 doesn’t play laserdiscs, it accepts most other forms of home-entertainment optical discs, including audio CDs, Video CDs, and DVDs of both 3-inch (8-cm) and 5-inch (12-cm) size, carrying audio with Dolby Digital or DTS encoding or, for that matter, linear PCM at bit rates and depths as great as 96 kHz and 24 bits. The DV-09 does not deliver 5.1-channel analog output from Dolby Digital or DTS discs, but it does pass both on, in digital form, for downstream decoding. The DV-09 has only two analog audio output channels; when you play stereo CDs, the output is plain stereo; when you play video CDs or Dolby Digital DVDs, surround information is matrixed into the two channels, to feed your Pro Logic decoder.
To make this final leap into the analog do main, the DV-09 uses Pioneer’s latest dual 96-kHz/24-bit Hi-Bit Legato Link digital-to-analog converters.
When the player is off, the main display blacks out totally, disappearing so completely into the high-gloss black front panel that the only sign of life is a small red “Standby” LED above the power switch. When the unit is on, the panel displays sharp, clean, bright, amber numerals that are easily discernible from across the room. Although the alphanumeric legends in the display aren’t large enough to see from a distance, they provide a remarkable breadth of information. Display brightness can be reduced in two steps, or quenched entirely so it won’t distract attention from your video screen. When you reduce the display’s brightness, the other panel indicators dark en proportionately, and, when the display and LEDs are off (but the player remains on), a dim “Display Off” lamp appears. Very nice!
Two red LEDs (“Digital Data Off” and “Component Frame DNR”) suggest operating conditions that might otherwise escape notice. “Digital Data Off” lights if you have disabled the digital-audio outputs during setup; “Component Frame DNR” indicates that you have adjusted luminance or chrominance noise reduction. And a remarkable number of those parameters are adjustable. You can separately vary horizontal and vertical picture sharpness over a nine-level range, adjust chroma level on the composite- and S-video outputs (also over a nine-level range), choose between two settings for black level, set noise reduction for composite video as well as for luminance and chrominance individually, and even tweak the relative timing of the chrominance and luminance channels. Not only that, four memories are provided for these settings, so you can quickly change the DV-09’s setup for different viewing conditions or different family members’ preferences.
The final panel indicator is a bright blue “DVD” lamp that blinks when you load or unload the tray and lights constantly when the mechanism has no disc in it (rather strange!) or is loaded with a DVD. The lamp goes out when an audio CD is loaded.
The DV-09’s transport mechanism lies behind a sort of air lock. When a disc is loading, the front- panel seal slowly lowers out of the way, the tray emerges silently at a tortoise-like speed, you load a disc, and the process reverses. All told, it takes about 15 seconds; it seems an eternity at the time, but you can’t help but be impressed by the style. The only controls on the front pan el (besides the power switch) are buttons to open and close the drawer, a pair to skip forward or back by chapter or track (depending upon the type of disc), and a bar to play or pause the transport. On the rear are two stereo pairs of “Audio Out” RCA jacks, two composite-video and two S-video out put connectors, one set of component-video RCA output jacks, a coaxial digital audio output dedicated to PCM signals, and an optical (Toslink) and a second coaxial jack that can convey PCM, Dolby Digital, and DTS signals to down stream decoders. Finally, there are miniplug “Control” input and out put jacks to link with Pioneer equipment bearing the “SR” mark.
It should be noted that, since the DV-09 does not have its own DTS decoder, DTS signals must be conveyed via a digital output to a downstream converter to play DTS CDs or DTS soundtracks on DVD (if and when such become avail able), as the analog audio outputs don’t function, even in stereo, when DTS soundtracks are played. This “limitation,” if you wish to call it that, is common to all DTS-compatible players presently on the market and is not peculiar to the DV-09.
The supplied remote is dedicated specifically to operation of the DV-09; it doesn’t know about any other piece of equipment, Pioneer’s or anyone else’s. Considering its vast array of similarly shaped, non-illuminated buttons and the player’s wide-ranging feature set, I’m not sure it would have been wise to tax this remote with additional jobs, anyway.
Fig. 1—THD + N vs. frequency.
Fig. 2—Frequency response; see text.
Fig. 3—THD + N vs. level.
Fig. 4—Deviation from linearity.
Fig. 5—Fade-to-noise test.
Fig. 6—Noise analysis.
Fig. 7—Stereo crosstalk.
Every button on the remote is accessible; nothing is hidden under doors, flaps, or anything else. At the LED-firing end are 35 identical-size buttons in seven rows of five, clustered about a central “Enter” pad and four directional arrows (which aren’t shaped all that differently from the buttons surrounding them). Behind this grouping are the transport-control buttons: fast “REV,” “Play,” and fast “FWD” in one row, “Jog Mode,” “FL Dimmer,” “Mode,” “Stop,” and “Pause” in the next. Except for the final four, these have different shapes. Backing it all up is a jog dial and concentric shuttle ring. You need a lot of ambient light and sharp eyesight to operate this remote.
That said, Pioneer’s Elite DV-09 does offer a full range of DVD features, including still frame, frame advance, slow play, repeat play, random play, program play, multiple aspect ratios, multi-angle, choice of dialog and subtitle language, multilevel parental lockout control, and audio dynamic-range control for nighttime listening use. You even get a choice of whether to freeze on a single field or a full frame when the disc is paused!
The DV-09’s “Last Memory” feature can memorize the point at which you stopped playback for the last five DVDs you’ve played, as well as the operational settings that were in effect at that time. When any of these discs is reloaded, play back automatically picks up from where you left off. As usual, this feature only works with those codes (including position) that the disc supports, but the DV-09 also offers “Condition Memory,” which stores the aspect ratio, subtitle language, and audio language settings that you normally use and recalls them for any disc.
The Elite DV-09’s setup options go far beyond the usual parental- control settings, DVD language choice (for menus, audio, and subtitles, separately), and aspect-ratio choice (on discs offering these features). Less common choices include selectable back ground colors for menu screens, a screen saver that prevents “burn- in” when an image has been frozen for an undue length of time, and the ability to choose the position of the on-screen display (OSD) and whether it will be in English, French, or Spanish. (The OSD language is independent of the DVD language choices, which are determined by what’s available on the disc.) You can also activate an on-screen symbol that indicates which scenes offer multiple viewing angles.
The output setup menus enable you to select the digital audio signal you want to come from the optical and PCM/Dolby Digital coaxial outputs. You can turn these signals off, force them to be linear PCM for Dolby Digital as well as PCM sources (for decoding by a Pro Logic system), or have the player automatically deliver whatever’s on the disc—Dolby Digital, DTS, or linear PCM. You can further choose whether any 96-kHz PCM audio on the disc should be sent to the digital output as is or, if your DACs can’t handle that, downsampled to 48 kHz. Last, but not least, don’t forget the DV-09’s remarkably versatile video adjustments referred to earlier. ‘While not every one will (or should) take advantage of these options, they certainly will appeal to the technically oriented viewer. Clearly, this is one far-out DVD player!
Measurements
My audio tests were made at the Elite DV-09’s main stereo outputs, using the CBS CD-1 disc as the program source. The results are unusual in several aspects; some might even be considered shockingly bad unless interpreted in light of Pioneer’s Legato Link processing. Legato Link is said to restore harmonics lost to the relatively low (44.1-kHz) sampling frequency of the CD format, so it must add harmonics that are not in the recorded signal—and instruments register any harmonics added by the device under test as distortion.
You can see this in Fig. 1, where the DV- 09’s total harmonic distortion plus noise (THD + N) turns up rather sharply at frequencies above 250 Hz. For the 22-kHz analysis bandwidth commonly employed for this test, THD ± N reaches a peak of 12.5% at 8 kHz. Frequency analysis of the output at this frequency, and 0 dBFS indicated that the distortion was predominantly third-harmonic, with some fifth- harmonic content as well, producing a waveform that looked quite similar to that resulting from a severe case of crossover distortion.
A 22-kHz analysis bandwidth reduces the odd-harmonic content of 8-kHz and higher signals, so I retested THD + N versus frequency with two wider bandwidths. As you can see in Fig. 1, measuring with band widths of 30 and 80 kHz did not greatly change distortion level, but it did let me see the harmonic content more clearly. With an 8-kHz signal, the third harmonic clearly predominated; the next strongest was the fifth, at a level 10 dB below the third. There were traces of second and fourth harmonic as well, but they were negligible. With a 10- kHz signal, the third harmonic predominated once again, and the fourth and fifth were approximately equal in level but about 15 dB lower than the third. There also was a minor amount of second-order distortion and noticeable trash throughout the spectrum, presumably caused by intermodulation of the various by-products with the sampling carrier.
At lower frequencies, 1 to 4 kHz, the distortion components were exclusively odd- order and were confined to the octave between 22 and 44 kHz. For example, with a 4-kHz signal, the predominant harmonics were the 7th, 9th, and 11th (28, 36, and 44 kHz), their strengths diminishing in that order. With a 2-kHz signal, the strongest component was the 11th harmonic, with 13th, 15th, 17th, 19th, and 21st harmonics present in gradually descending strength. And with a 1-kHz test tone, the strongest harmonic was the 23rd (23 kHz), with gradually decreasing harmonics through the 33rd at least.
Common wisdom has it that odd-order distortion is more obtrusive than even and that the psychoacoustic annoyance factor increases radically with the order of the harmonic (some suggest, as the power of the order), which makes one wonder why anybody would want this behavior. I don’t presume to answer that question, but Pioneer clearly goes to considerable effort to produce precisely this effect with Legato Link, and, just as clearly, it must have a following or the company wouldn’t be doing it. You can also see an effect of Legato Link in the DV-09’s frequency response (Fig. 2), which is absolutely ruler-flat to 7 kHz and then abruptly drops by 0.8 dB in the region where the strongest harmonics are generated.
Legato Link harmonic generation may be level- as well as frequency-sensitive. The DV-09’s THD + N at 1 kHz (Fig. 3) drops from an unusually high —67.4 dBFS (using a 30-kHz analysis bandwidth to include the harmonics revealed by the spectrum analysis) to —95 dBFS (arguably a lot lower than the norm) when the signal level drops by 20 dB. With a 1-kHz signal, most of the meaningful harmonics lie below 30 kHz, so there was no point showing data taken with an 80-kHz bandwidth.
You can see from the graphs of the DV- 09’s linearity error versus level using dithered and undithered 1 -kHz recordings (Fig. 4) and fade-to-noise linearity error at 500 Hz (Fig. 5) that Pioneer’s converters are quite linear down to —90 dBFS but deviate more than today’s best delta-sigma (“1- bit”) noise-shaped DACs at signal levels at and below —100 dBFS. Of course, not every one agrees that noise-shaped DACs pro duce the best sound, and third-octave spectral analyses (Fig. 6) suggest that Pioneer prefers to forgo extensive noise shaping. The AC-line component and its odd harmonics shown suggest some magnetic leak age, probably from the power transformer, but their levels are too small to worry about. As you can see in “Measured Data,” signal-to-noise ratio, quantization noise, and dynamic range are all very good. Channel separation (Fig. 7) is superb.
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MEASURED DATA:
DVD VIDEO
Luminance Frequency Response: +0.3, —0.2 dB from 0.5 to 4.2 MHz and less than 1.9 dB down at 5.5 MHz. Luminance Level: 101 IRE (+ 1%). Black Level Accuracy: No measurable error.
Gray-Scale Accuracy: No measurable
PCM AUDIO
Line Output Level: 2.01 volts.
Channel Balance: ±0 dB.
Line Output Impedance: 465 ohms.
Frequency Response: +0, —0.8 dB, 20 Hz to 20kHz.
THD + N at 0 dBFS, 20 Hz to 20 kHz: With 22-kHz measurement bandwidth, less than 12.5%; with 30-kHz measurement bandwidth, less than 17.6%; with an 80-kHz measurement band width, less than 2 1.0%.
THD + N at 1 kHz: With 22-kHz measurement bandwidth, below —71.1 dBFS from 0 to —90 dBFS and below —95.5 dBFS from —30 to —90 dBFS; with 30-kHz bandwidth, below —67.4 dBFS from 0 to —90 dBFS and below —95 dBFS from —30 to —90 dBFS.
Maximum Linearity Error: Undithered recording, 0.54 dB from 0 to —90 dBFS; dithered recording, 0.2 dB to —100 dBFS.
S/N Ratio: A-weighted, 114.3 dB; CCIR weighted, 106.6 dB.
Quantization Noise: —95.8 dBFS.
Dynamic Range: Unweighted, 95.9 dB; A-weighted, 99.3 dB; CCIR-Weighted, 89.7 dB.
Channel Separation, 125 Hz to 16 kHz: Greater than 113.7 dB. error.
Chrominance Channel Response: —6 dB or better at 2.75 MHz.
Chroma Level Accuracy (Multiburst Method): —0.7 dB.
Chroma Level (Vectorscope Method): 100% to 103%, depending on color. Chroma Phase Accuracy: Within 2°, depending on color.
Chroma Differential Gain: No measurable error.
Chroma Differential Phase: No measurable error.
Chroma-Luma Time Displacement: With THX disc, no measurable error; with Sony disc, chroma delayed by 80 nanoseconds.
Overshoot: On 20-IRE window, 2.5 IRE; on 40- through 100-IRE windows, 0 IRE.
Chroma Burst Level: 37 IRE peak to peak (—0.7 dB).
Sync Pulse Level: 41 IRE (+0.2 dB).
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The DV-09 is the first DVD player I’ve had an opportunity to evaluate with the new THX test disc (which Lucasfilm generously supplied) as well as with my “old” Sony disc. The THX disc enabled me to take more measurements and modify some procedures (often using more than one approach) to ferret out video performance more thoroughly than I could before. In fu ture DVD-player reviews, I expect that I will further revise my test procedures, adding measurements that promise to yield pertinent information and dropping others that don’t. Bear with me.
To say that the video characteristics of the Pioneer Elite DV-09 are outstanding would be an understatement. It establishes a new benchmark in just about all regards. In every case where I have grounds for com parison, the DV-09’s video performance is as near perfect as I have ever experienced. As you can see from “Measured Data,” luminance-channel frequency response, measured using a multiburst pattern, was within +0.3, —0.2 dB, from 500 kHz to 4.2 MHz, and then only because of a small response ripple in the region between I and 2 MHz. This ripple also showed up when I evaluated luminance-channel response with a frequency sweep, so it’s clearly there—but clearly negligible, too.
Using a sweep signal, which extends to a higher frequency than the multibursts, I could explore how the player responded to fine horizontal detail. Above 4.2 MHz, the response fell smoothly but gradually and was down less than 1.9 dB at the 5.5-MHz sweep limit. Clearly the DV-09 can provide excellent horizontal resolution on mono chrome source material that calls for it.
The DV-09’s luminance (“white”) level was high, but only by 1%, and black level was as accurate as I can measure. After adjusting for the overall black-to-white range, gray-scale was perfect at all intermediate steps. The horizontal sync pulse was a tad stronger than necessary, but that’s no problem. The chroma burst was 0.7 dB low, as measured using the multipulses recorded on the THX disc. The chroma level, measured with a vectorscope while playing the EIA 75% color bars on the THX disc, was effectively spot on target; I’d not trust the vectorscope for measurements closer than 1% or 2%, anyway. Chroma phase accuracy, within 2° for all colors, was about as good as it gets. (As a reminder, chroma level relates to the saturation or intensity of colors while chroma phase correlates with hue, or tint, accuracy.) Chroma differential gain (variation in color saturation due to differences in scene brightness) and chroma differential phase (changes in tint as a function of scene brightness) were completely absent.
Chrominance/luminance timing error (a new measurement that suggests whether color images will appear as sharp as mono chrome ones) was unmeasurable when I used the THX disc, but the chroma signal was delayed by approximately 80 nanoseconds relative to the luminance when I used the Sony disc. I have no ready explanation for this difference; we’ll have to wait and see whether it continues to show up on different players. Whichever disc is “correct” (and I have no reason to suspect that the THX disc isn’t), the Elite DV-09 is the first player I’ve found in which the user can control this parameter.
The Lucasfilm disc also carries a set of white windows recorded at various brightness levels. I used these to measure over shoot at the transitions between black and white. Only the 20-IRE window elicited any overshoot at all, and it was relatively minor, albeit noticeable on the monitor.
Use and Listening Tests
I have not liked Legato Link in the past; it’s sounded harsh and raucous to me, especially with music that was bright and loud to begin with. I still don’t like it, but I accept that others do. Still, technical tests are technical tests, and, in this review, I am faced with the issue of THX certification. I know that Lucasfilm has specific restrictions on permissible levels of harmonic distortion, frequency-response deviation, and other characteristics adversely affected by Legato Link conversion. I do not know what those tolerances are, because Lucasfilm releases that information only to its licensees, but I’d be surprised if the folks at The Ranch considered distortion of 12.5% to 21% (de pending upon analysis bandwidth) to be within them.
And yet, in the type of system in which the Pioneer Elite DV-09 is likely to be used, Legato Link is a nonissue! Any home theater with a $2,000 DVD player will certainly have a 5.1-channel surround-sound system, which in this case means that it will have a downstream Dolby Digital (or DTS) surround decoder, because the DV-09 doesn’t provide 5.1-channel analog output. That downstream box, not the DV-09, will establish sound quality, so let’s just put Legato Link aside. If you like Legato Link, buy a Pioneer Elite decoder with Legato Link con version and enjoy; if not, buy a different de coder and enjoy the Elite DV-09’s video performance.
And, in a word, that performance is fantastic! In my book, the Elite DV-09 certainly qualifies as a world-class reference DVD player. Resolution is outstanding. Colors are bright, sharp, and clean as a whistle.
I’m not sure you’ll have great use for certain of the more special features. For example, with the discs I used, I had no need for the various noise reduction options—but my source material was very clean, and there may be occasions where noise reduction comes in handy. The chrominance/luminance time-shift adjustment may well prove useful with some discs. It had a noticeable effect on the test patterns I displayed, and some discs seemed to benefit from a slight shift in setting.
Although I can’t give the highest marks to the DV-09’s remote, or to its menuing and manual, I’d willingly compromise convenience for this kind of performance. Make no mistake about it, the Pioneer Elite DV-09’s video performance is truly of the highest rank, and I’d be happy to give this player a starring role in my home theater any time, any day.
Also see Stereophile 1999 review.
Adapted from 1998 Audio magazine article. Classic Audio and Audio Engineering magazine issues are available for free download at the Internet Archive (archive.org, aka The Wayback Machine)