The McCormack UDP-1, by Jim Merod

Warming Up

In the mid 1990s, when Conrad-Johnson bought McCormack Audio and created McCormack Audio Corporation of Virginia, one heard rumblings in the audio industry that a unique (and in many ways trend-setting) company known for its quality and down-to-earth pricing might be going in a different direction. Since there are few places in the high-end audio market one can find such a high-performance / low-cost ratio, this buzz was mostly a function of worry.

C-J's own, well-established reputation as a maker of immensely musical tube amplifiers and preamplifiers ought to have displaced such unnecessary worry. But worry, like bad breath, shows up when least needed. Thus, now that McCormack Audio owns a clear track record across the last decade, premature worry is a distant memory remembered only by curmudgeons who take considerable irritation from blackguards of any stripe.

Conrad-Johnson, one notes, has demonstrated a degree of maturity and leadership in an industry beset by too many start-up companies going after a limited audio market. The story over the last few years has been the growth of multi-channel home theatre and the slow, but steady appearance of surround sound. Viva new markets. Viva industry leadership.

McCormack Rides Again

When McCormack of Virginia set its priorities, one overarching goal seemed to prevail. The objective, according to Lew Johnson, Bill Conrad, and founding engineer/designer Steve McCormack, was to continue the set of audio projects underway at the point of business transfer—to maintain continuity in the product line and to tailor its evolution on a course that complemented Conrad-Johnson's overall goals.

That has been done, and the one thing that seems to stand out about the merging of these two highly accomplished companies is the partnership that the principals attest to, a rare achievement in any professional field or business venture.

The primary constant in that model was Steve McCormack himself. Bill Conrad and Lew Johnson were aware of their new colleague's brilliance and innovative energy. They preferred to join their ideas with his, rather than trump the partnership with top-down managerial zeal. The result has been a series of products—including the McCormack MAP-1 surround sound preamplifier—which are at the edge of state-of-the-art. The astonishing thing about that repeated accomplishment is the modest price point that McCormack gear carries. You can spend more if you wish, and possibly (if you're lucky) find an amplifier or surround preamp with more features and, perhaps, more stunning results, but seldom does an audiophile or home theatre devotee find better price-to-performance outcomes. That stunning fact alone reveals itself not only to consumers looking for upgrades to their systems, but to audio reviewers who enjoy the good news of an audio story in which—better than a man biting a pooch—folks without big bucks can afford an astonishingly high level of audio quality.

Figure 1: The McCormack UDP-1

Handsome Box, Big Performance

Debuted at CES in January, the McCormack UDP-1 Universal Disc Player has now hit the street, a high-torque drag racer in the guise of a weekend convertible. Do not let the UDP-1's modest exterior fool you into thinking this beast doesn't blow doors at each gear ratio. Drive it at your peril. Once you plop your favorite compact disc or SACD in it... whoosh, you're off!

On another occasion I'll look at this impressive uni-disc box as a video player in tandem with the new McCormack MAP-1 surround sound player. For our purposes here, the UDP-1 is examined as a stand-alone digital front end that covers all your music source needs.

My first complete introduction to what digital sound at its best could create was the long visit I had with Linn's $20,000 CD-12: an absolute state-of-the-digital-world piece of gear. It is very difficult to talk about its sound. The universe defined by music and sound exists at a far distance from the universe of language and ideas. The two realms cross, of course, or our human world would be more divided than it is already. Words approach sound and music but never really appropriate their elusive, essentially wordless truth. The Linn CD-12 left me almost speechless in its glorious recreation of music encoded on compact discs.

Linn's recent Unidisk universal disc player, like the McCormack UDP-1, is a glorious music-making machine, also. At $10,000, it is not within reach of many audiophile budgets. As I've noted in this publication, it is a contender for the same praise, the same ears, and the same refined taste that the earlier CD-12 received in the 16-bit digital sphere.

The virtue of McCormack's UDP-1 is not merely its great sound at what, by the lofty standard and lofty price established by Linn, is a genuine bargain. The virtue of the UDP-1 is its unruffled ability to make any digital audio disc sound at once convincingly musical with a sense of ease that is rare at any price, while conveying the feeling that your chosen SACD or DVD-A or plebeian compact disc is somehow part of the analog realm of musical truth.

I do not mean that the UDP-1 crafts “analog” sound from 16 or 24 bits. I do mean to say, however, that its sonic relaxation is so utterly without “edge” or the almost inaudible artifacts that linger even with SACD discs (despite their enormous resolution) that you have an abiding sense of hearing an analog source. That, of course, is the goal of higher-bit sound streams, but it is an elusive goal. One's ear is not fooled by digital sound into “hearing” an analog musical source. Impossible, if your hearing is not damaged, because the seductive and serpentine sonic linearity of analog recordings does not ask the brain to fill in missing audio pieces... does not etch out accurate, but nonetheless approximate, musical reproductions.

Reproductions of analog-based, analog-defined, analog-saturated musical signals, I should say, since music is an analog fact in its creation (unless you dwell with synthesizers, etc.). Even the most startling SACD and DVD-A reproduction does not capture the whole of music's analog texture, its sinuous and infinitely nuanced sonic subtlety.

Thus, when I point to the approach toward an analog-like music reproduction at the heart of the McCormack UDP-1, I'm indicating something rare... perhaps something rarer than many people realize. Since we live so deeply within a media-saturated culture, and since that culture is increasingly defined by digital audio and video reproduction, the differences between analog and digital representation are becoming somewhat obscure. Most of us do not conduct our daily life inspecting the alteration of our perceptual reference. To do so for a short period might be a useful experiment, but on the whole we are essentially oblivious to ways in which the digital domain has taken over our sense of representational reality.

Figure 2: The UDP-1 Connectors

Representational Reality

Perhaps I have an unfair advantage in moving toward such an experiment. Since I hear so much live music and immerse myself in the nuances and power of the world of analog sonic immediacy, I cannot easily divorce myself from differences between what I hear with naked auditory attention and what I hear on (and from) my digital recording and reproduction equipment.

I've often noted that I hate speakers. I sometimes mention that I do not like recording devices, with the exception of microphones. I'm a nut case about microphones. I've seldom met a mic (including my least favorite Shure SM-57 and 58 mics) that I do not like. I am also in awe of strides made in the world of digital recording gear. A huge amount of audio ground has been covered since the first Panasonic SV-55 portable digital recorder appeared on the market at the opening of the ‘90s.

The bottom line is that music reproduction is largely in “digital hands” and those hands have gotten warmer, less grating, more accurate, and more welcome to music. I guess I'm sensitive to the shortcomings of digital recording and playback equipment because I so badly want to capture music precisely as it sounds—analog sound, analog relaxation, analog joy—but, for practical reasons (most of my recording work is done live on location) and for financial reasons too, great analog recording gear is out of bounds for most of my work.

Thus, when a better box of any essential sort —say, the Millennia HV3D mic preamplifier or the McCormack UDP-1 universal disc player—appears, I feel affirmed. Delighted. I skip like a kid again. I do. Nut case.

The UDP-1 has elicited joyful skipping. For me, the test of reproduction gear is how faithfully it recreates master recordings I have made. With the UDP-1 in hand, I've played dozens of 16-bit “raw dumps”—CDs I have made directly from my 16- or 24-bit master tapes. I have created several DVD-Audio discs recorded at high-resolution (24/48 to 24/96) and upsampled to 24/192. Amazing stuff. In sum, I've played long-familiar commercial discs and recently recorded material. I've played SACDs and my own DVD-A discs. I've tried to push the UDP-1 to its sonic limits.

I haven't yet found a moment or instance when this box suggested it was not up to the task of full-bore sonic ease and analog-like relaxation. Perhaps the aspect of this friendly box that I respect the most is that it makes me want to stay in one place and listen either with full attention (critically) or with that offhand, less than alert listening in which, while reading or making notes, you find yourself somehow engaged beneath the level of full awareness. There is a bliss in such half-attention that revives your waking consciousness. Suddenly, though previously distracted, you snap back to hear the clarity and sonic glory before you... in the case of the UDP-1, you hear its precision, its joyful ease, and its analog breeding.

With the single exception of Linn's mind-boggling CD-12 and a Goldmund transport that I spent many months doing mastering work with, the UDP-1 is the only digital reproduction machine I've heard that approaches a genuine sense of analog sonic textures, all the while delivering extraordinary dynamic range, huge soundstage spatiality, and that indefinable quality called musical magic.

Figure 3: The Inside of the UDP-1

Touché, UDP-1

I could add nearly endless details that would recount the specific nuances of each dedicated auditioning. Such further commentary would underline my assessment's instructed pleasure. Instead, as a way of registering respect for a piece of gear that, for me, has become crucial to my daily working environment, I prefer to culminate with appreciative bluntness. Few items that cross my review path stop me dead in my tracks. Believe me, there are dozens of extra-special pieces of equipment that light up my recording world. Ditto the universe of two- and multi-channel playback, the audiophile's special terrain. Perhaps two times a year, maybe three, I audition an item that re-defines part of my recording or reproduction work.

The UDP-1 is one of those. After long listening and comparative evaluations, I'm left with a sense of privilege that such gear comes along now and then to advance my knowledge, my pleasure, and my work. The McCormack UDP-1 establishes a standard for sound quality and for cost-performance value that every universal disc player now on and soon to join the audio-video market must cope with... perhaps at their peril.