TEAC VRDS-701
I am watching four needles dance against a Mountain Dew (or is it Mellow Yellow; audiophiles might be divided) hued illuminated background, and I am happy. McIntosh this is not, and that’s a good thing. The blue meters of the venerated company are ubiquitous but, like Harley Davidson, are getting long in the tooth. This is fresh, brisk, a beautiful return to classic HiFi with a twist. In the place of a stack of separates sits a heavily loaded front end source and a couple of powerful and lithe Class D amps. Welcome back, TEAC!
TEAC? They’re still around? Maybe I have been too long in the rarified air of the Western upper-end HiFi atmosphere. I do not recall seeing TEAC (their upper end line, Esoteric, is ubiquitous) at the shows I have attended over the past several years. Maybe they have been present, and I was unobservant, in which case TEAC might say welcome back, Doug!
When I was getting rolling as a young two-channel enthusiast, Japanese HiFi set the pace. Through the years there has been a lot of carnage, with Nakamichi, Sansui, Akai, Aiwa, Sony, JVC, NEC, Sanyo, Kenwood, and Pioneer all fading. The land of the rising sun used to be the standard for the high end, but they lost it and Western products emerged victorious. But maybe it’s not over; some like TEAC, Onkyo and Marantz, remain and are pushing hard to make a comeback. In this review I discover that TEAC is giving the audiophile a lot more technological firepower and very refined sound for a lot less money than most Western HiFi products.
There is a retrospective on TEAC’s website in which the company’s name is revealed, Tokyo Electro-Acoustic Company. It has some impressive feats, including the world’s first slow motion video recorder, used for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. In 1977, the Star Wars character R2-D2’s voice was recorded on a TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck. Bruce Springsteen used a TEAC multi-track cassette tape recorder in 1982 to record his album “Nebraska”. These people know what they are doing, and it shows in the degree of quality infused in the 70th anniversary 700 Series. TEAC has survived the kiln of the Western audiophile community and has come out refined. The degree of refinement is shown in the VRDS-701, CG-10M-X, and the AP-701, which I will discuss in this review.
TEAC is not given to attaching enchanting names to its products but still uses lab-grade identifications. I speculate that precision of nomenclature is considered rigorous in Japan, and when you have hundreds of products it might be a challenge to be endlessly creative. You cannot accuse TEAC of not telling you what you are getting when you buy their products. Case in point, the anchor component for the system under review is the VRDS-701 Dual Monaural USB/DAC CD Player/Pre-Amp/Headphone Amplifier. “VRDS” stands for Vibration-Free Rigid Disc-Clamping System, derived from the transport which has received notoriety with the company’s higher end Esoteric line. Esoteric is respected as a serious HiFi company. I recall hearing their products several times and they have chops; no slouch products are they! High end fans could do a lot worse than moving to Esoteric gear.
I had not relied upon a TEAC component for forty years, dating back to my V-330 Tape Deck from 1984-85! TEAC will not like this, but the Nakamichi CR-1A I bought and still own smoked it. Now, Nakamichi has been reduced to a shell of its former self, making sound bars (one ironically called the Dragon, the name originally associated with their premier cassette deck) and gimmicky multicolored party speakers. Long term, the victory has gone to TEAC. I wonder what would happen if I compared the current TEAC AD-850-SE Cassette Deck/CD Player to my still minty CR-1A? I’m not going there because I am not returning to cassette tapes. I already relented from my slip up of a couple years ago, when I was given a like new Realistic LAB-400 Turntable and original cartridge from my in-laws. I wanted to see if the vinyl gene was still active inside me, so I bought a preamp and tried a return to vinyl. Nope, not happening. The entry level sound quality was not moving me emotionally or intellectually. I was not going to spend $10K MSRP for a good vinyl rig and many more thousands for media. I can get a prodigious pair of speakers of another genre for that kind of money (spoiler alert; see my review of the Colibri C2 High Performance Compact Loudspeaker). My son was given the LAB-400 and other components to make a reasonable starter HiFi.
It would’ve been interesting to make some tapes using the Analog Output of the VRDS-701, but my tape making days are behind me. I do not feel like scouring the world for tapes, then working my butt off trying to make them CD quality. I used to spend hours futzing with Dolby A, B, and C, running comparisons with recording and playback using different settings. If I recall, my favorite combo was to record in Dolby C and play back with no Dolby. Those were the days! Seeing the dancing needles on the amplifiers’ meters brings back such sweet memories!
Into the technical jungle
For a Western audiophile who has operated from the received wisdom that a component with less functions means superior sound, working with a Japanese component is an exercise in function overload. The VRDS-701 gives you copious functionality if nothing else! I love the options to contour the system because it means many opportunities to find the One, the glorious combination of settings that connects to the spirit with a wide range of music. It’s all good, if the sound quality is acceptable. I find the 700 Series’ components’ sound to be quite acceptable. More about that in a bit.
I stopped recounting every feature in components in my reviews years ago; a flick of the fingers brings the curious reader the teacusa.com website, where they can peruse the VRDS-701’s two dozen selectable settings under five menus (UNIT, ANALOG, DSP, DAC, and PLAYER)! Thoughtful features such as CD playback in Shuffle/Random or Program settings, Auto Power Save (automatic shut down after half hour), and Power On Play (plays a CD upon startup) are nice conveniences. Important to the critical listener are the DAC options (DELTA SIGMA Fs, PCM DELTA SIGMA, and DSD LPF), and the DSP options (UPCONVERT, CLOCK CD, CLOCK USB, CLOCK COAXIAL, CLOCK OPTICAL, COAXIAL OUT, and OPTICAL OUT). The unit is highly configurable!
Some operations are confusing if the Owner’s Manual is followed to the letter. The Clock function, meaning external clock, according to the flow chart in the Owner’s Manual, seems to require linking the clock to the Input in the DSP Setting menu. But there is nothing of the sort in that menu. I stepped through the menus and functions to conclude that the choice of Input (USB, Coaxial, or Optical) is not part of these 24 menus, but is independently selected with the remote or face of the unit. I was looking in the menu for “Clock” to link it to each source, but the source controls the use of the clock, and it shows up automatically. Such confusion could be cleared up by TEAC in a revision to the Owner’s Manual. It’s not uncommon for a Manual to be updated, and when there are so many features and options, I’m not surprised there is some confusion.
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