Building on the success of the Blu and the DAC64 the
RED Reference CD player has been designed as the ultimate source component.
With stunning looks and state of the art design the
RED utilises ground breaking technology to give the most accurate reproduction
of compact disc that can be obtained.
With internal 176.4KHz upsampling data transfer,
selectable RAM buffer clock retiming and both 1024 and 4096 tap length
filtering the RED earns its reference status in the Chord range.
Starting on the outside the RED features the Chord
trademark design and is manufactured from solid aluminium giving a rigid
support structure for the CD mechanism.
The front panel design incorporates ball bearing push
button control for the commonly used functions and a dual display showing CD
status on one side and input, buffer and frequency information on the other.
Uniquely the CD mechanism sits at 45 degrees to allow
front access even if placed on a stand or in a rack.
Access to the CD is at the touch of a button
operating a solenoid controlled fluid damped door.
At the rear connections are made via gold plated
phono or BNC coax, plastic optical fibre or balanced XLR style connections.
Internally the latest CD Pro 2 mechanism from Philips
is re-clocked using a highly accurate crystal oscillator then the synchronised
data is fed to the upsampling and filtering electronics.
Here the 4096 tap length WTA filter is used to
minimise the transient timing errors and reconstruct the digital data to
either 44.1, 88.2 or 176.4KHz sampling frequencies.
This data is fed to the rear XLR and optical output
connectors and also via a dual data bus to the digital to analogue conversion
electronics. Based on the DAC64 the digital signal is converted from 176.4KHz
to analogue audio using 1024 tap filtering and 64 bit digital signal
processing core.
This is followed by 64 bit 7th order noise shaping,
2048 times oversampling rates and improved pulse width modulated elements.
This gives much better measured performance, better
detail resolution with a smoother more focused sound quality.
The DAC also features RAM buffer technology that
sequentially takes in all the data, re-times, it then sends it out giving
jitter free operation.
Digital data from other sources can also be fed into
the RED via the optical or AES balanced XLR connections.
All of the above innovations are implemented in Field
Programmable Gate Arrays that can be reprogrammed by simply changing the EPROM
memory chip, thus future proofing is assured.
The RED Reference is a truly unique product. As a
standalone CD player it is able to deliver the best reference CD playback.
The addition of digital inputs and outputs also
gives it the ability to act as both a CD transport and DAC
for other audio components making it completely versatile
