Bow Technologies ZZ-Eight CD player

“Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is, but it is gonna be great!”—Tony, West Side Story

While the Sharks and the Jets rumble in the consumer electronics playground, knife-fighting for supremacy in the next software go-round, in 1998 we’re still living in the 16-bit/44.1kHz audio world, and will be doing so for the foreseeable future. Maybe your idea of audio bliss is listening to the equivalent of computing with a Commodore 64, but it’s not mine.

Will the future bring us Sony’s and Philips’ “Super Audio” CD? Could be! Or the Working Group 4’s (aka Toshiba, Matsushita, Pioneer, JVC, Hitachi, Thomson, et al) 24-bit/96kHz DVD-Audio? Who knows?

As we head into the next century, whatever it is we’re gonna get may be just out of reach as of mid-1998, but it’s still down a very long block. Yes, the “miracle” is due, but don’t hold your breath. And, like Leonard Bernstein, this West Side Story metaphor is rapidly decomposing, so I’ll bury it.

We’re in for a protracted fight over the next digital format. Add the multichannel issue, resistance by a skeptical record industry, and an already overstuffed retail business not eager for yet another new floor-space filler, and you can see why we won’t have a new, readily available high-resolution digital format anytime soon.

For those of us who’ve never embraced CD enthusiastically, the past 15 years have been a period of extreme frustration tinged with a great deal of anger and topped with a dollop of disgust. Of necessity we’ve bought CD players, transports, and D/A converters, and tinkered with green paint, digital cables, jitter-reduction boxes, resolution enhancers, AT&T glass, AES/EBU connectors, and so on—but in the end, when we sit down to listen to and emotionally connect with music, it’s on vinyl, at least as far as I am concerned.

Looking back, those who posted their charts of flat frequency response, ultrawide channel separation, and low noise and distortion in order to “prove” the perfection of digital audio, look pretty foolish today. The only thing they proved was that digital solved most of analog’s most vexing problems. Digital’s problems weren’t measurable at that time, therefore they didn’t exist! How convenient. When anyone pointed out that something they heard on a CD didn’t sound quite right, it was analog’s fault. Remember? Either the “purity” of CD was revealing the analog source’s faults, or the listener wasn’t yet used to the “perfection.”

The real heroes of the pioneering digital era were the guys and gals who figured out what was really worth measuring in the digital domain that was causing the audible problems, so they could be fixed. The villains were those who maintained—and, incredibly, continue to maintain—that there were and are no problems.

While all of the past decade’s innovations and discoveries in the digital domain have led to some genuine and sometimes startling sonic improvements, at the end of the day we’re still left holding a 16-bit/44.1kHz bag. No wonder sales of expensive outboard DACs and transports have just about ground to a halt. To drag out another old show lyric, “They’ve gone about as far as they can go.”

The one-box solution
What better way to usher out the 16-bit/44.1kHz era than to simplify life with a single box incorporating everything that’s been learned over the past decade and a half? That’s what Bow Technologies’ Bo Christensen (along with many other manufacturers of late) figured when he set out to design the stylish $6900 ZZ-Eight. While the company makes a far more expensive separate transport (ZZ-Two) and processor (ZZ-Three) combo, the ZZ-Eight incorporates many of the innovations found in those two boxes, including (and especially) the I²S data buss between the modified Philips CDM 12Pro CD-ROM drive and the processor section, which utilizes the Pacific Microsonics PMD 100 HDCD filter.

There are two big cost-saving differences between the ZZ-Eight’s inboard processor and the outboard ZZ-Three. First is the ZZ-Eight’s use of two stacked K-grade Burr-Brown PCM 1702 20-bit/8x-oversampling D/A converters per channel instead of the ZZ-Three’s four. Second is the ZZ-Eight’s current/voltage conversion, which uses two Analog Devices 744 op-amp chips instead of the ZZ-Three’s discrete, single-ended, class-A zero-feedback design, featuring big, expensive Jensen paper/oil decoupling caps and four power supplies per channel. You can’t have it all for $6900, but, as I found during my time with the ZZ-Eight, you can still have plenty!

Let’s get physical
The top-loading, low-slung ZZ-Eight is one of the most aesthetically pleasing players you’ll encounter, and it’s built like a bomb shelter. Its guts are housed in a 35-lb hunk of sculpted, satin-polished, anodized black aluminum you’ll want to run your hands over often. The chassis rests on four feet fitted with medium-hard rubber donuts designed to decouple the unit from the outside world.

In addition, Bow Tech supplies a single metal cone that screws into the rear center of the chassis’ underside and couples with a massive brass internal subchassis that houses the transport mechanism. Buyers are asked to experiment with the cone in place of the two rear feet to hear which setup sounds better.

An easily legible, mercifully large acrylic LED display protrudes from the chassis front. Six brass-colored push switches adorn the unit’s top plate, to the front and on either side of the disc receptacle. The chassis rear houses a master On/Off rocker switch, IEC AC jack, Teflon-insulated RCA analog output jacks, and—should you wish to use the ZZ-Eight as a transport—both RCA and preferred, true 75 ohm BNC digital outputs. (A $5500 transport-only version is available.)

The spoked, self-centering magnetic disc stabilizer is easy to use, but you have to be careful not to scratch the chassis when you drop the stabilizer into place. Playback is rapid and straightforward once the disc is in place and you’ve switched the machine from Standby to On via the remote control or the top-mounted switch.

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Bow Technologies

Durob Audio BV

PO Box 109

5250 AC Vlijmen, The Netherlands

www.bowtechnologies.com

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