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An in our opinion better solution to handle hi-res recordings is a player that accepts raw DVD WAV files. At the moment there are two offerings we know of. First there’s the Oppo BDP-95. This friendly priced player accepts almost any format from Blu-Ray to SACD and all formats in-between. It runs a 32-bit Sabre DAC which can be bypassed to run the S/PDIF output to an external DAC of your choice.

The other is the PS Audio PerfectWave transport. At thrice the price of the Oppo the PWT is only a transport but memory player as well. A chunk of the data is read and stored in large onboard memory. Here it is reclocked before being sent out to an external DAC, preferably a PS Audio PerfectWave DAC which can accept the proprietary I²S over HDMI interface. And yes, that’s another 3 grand out of pocket.

With regard to playing hi-res WAV files via DVD, the Oppo besides its price has another advantage. It can play files stored in a sub folder (sub directory) on the disc. The PWT is only able to process music files stored in the root or top directory.
Todd sent us a stack of his hi-res issues - Será una Noche’s eponymous recording and the group’s La Segunda; Mathias Landæus Trio Opening; Punte Celeste Nama; Ravid Goldschmidt and Silvia Perez Cruz Llama; and Martin Zeller J.S. Bach - 6 Suites à Violoncello Solo Senza Basso Vol. 1. Owning a PS Audio PWT/PWD combination, these albums did not have to undergo any file conversion process or copying the WAV files to a designated folder/directory on the hard disk before playing them with the Windows-only XX Highend software player. They had to be fed only into the PWT to hit ‘play’. While checking the file format, the PWT sends a handshake protocol to the PWD informing the DAC of the disc resolution to set it accordingly.


M•A Recordings DVDs come in a variety of resolutions which reflect the state of the art at the time each original recording was made. Todd did not upsample at any stage. The recordings are as they were originally before being mastered for CD. As a result there is a variety of word sizes and sample frequencies throughout. The Bach cello recording and Llama are in 24/88.2, the first Será una Noche issue is in 24/96 while the jazz trio of Mathias Landæus, Punte Celeste and the second Será una Noche are in 24/176.4. As a bonus the jazz trio also has the recording in 88.2 FLAC and the Llama and first Será una Noche recordings have a 2.8MHz DSD version for owners of a PSP3 or Korg DSD recorder.


Because hi-res offerings are novel to M•A Recordings, there’s a learning curve. One issue was that both the Será una Noche and Mathias Landæus Trio DVD store their WAV files in a sub folder of the DVD. This meant the software controlling our PWT could find no playable files to reject the disc. All others were recognized without a problem. To circumvent the location problem—no issue for the Oppo BDP-95—we had to first copy the WAV files to a writable DVD. That went without a hitch though it was a bit time consuming. First you copy the WAV files to a temporary folder on a computer, then burn them to the writeable DVD. Now our player could play them.

Probably the most popular M•A Recordings disc is the first Será una Noche. In our record collection we discovered two issues of it. One is the original ‘normal’ CD, the other the XRCD version Todd mastered with Kazuie Sugimoto at the JVC Mastering Center in Yokohama. Now we had a third as the original 24/96 DAT recording to make informed comparisons.
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