Theta Universal Transport 2     

The search  of King of Transports continues

As  far as legends in audio go, this is one hell of a legend.  Theta for me is a symbol of absolute top level gear,  something inaccessible, expensive, cult symbol.
And it is so  macho, so american, so big. The fact that the drawer is half meter wide makes it a humvee of the CD kingdom. An overkill.

In the mid nineties, few US companies had that status of world superstars, popularized outside of the US by Stereophile magazine. Remember, there was no internet back then.
In CD  department Wadia and Theta were the two competitors for the crown, in amplifier department - Levinson and Krell.

The history of Theta is written HERE

This pretty photo was stolen from internet. My Theta is black.



I never dreamed about owning a real Theta, but one day - I snapped it from US ebay.  Days seemed like weeks, but finally the box landed in my home. Or should I say the crate - because box is inappropriate word for the cube THAT BIG. 
To put things into perspective,  theta is half meter wide, half meter deep, and 20 cm high. It must hold the title of the largest CD player in the world, maybe only beaten by the Forsell Air Reference.

I don't remember how much it costed when new, but probably close to 5000 USD.  I paid 500 today.

Well, buying a childhood dream is like bouncing onto the Miss School -  40 years later. Can be  a recipe for big disappointment.

And it was.
Before I could hear how it sounds, I had a good look inside. Theta engineering, a whole ton of it ! I love to learn about honest engineering, to look over the shoulder of the world's best engineers, HOW THINGS SHOULD BE DONE.  I have seen enough of cheap players, and I was so disappointed after testing Wadia WT3200 which turned out to be a dressed up Philips CD960.
Now MY THETA is another story - this is the real McCoy.








After removal of the gigantic cover I saw the inside - and nearly fainted! Inside there is simply an entire Philips laser disc player even with own chassis. I mean not just the mechanism, not some PCB, but WHOLE PLAYER is put in the Theta oversized box.
Speaking of boxes, Theta box is the cheapest steel box you can have, nothing like Wadia overkill alu boxes. It is of lesser quality than the cheapest Chinese goodies of today, like Music Angel, Vincent or Shanling. The C shaped steel pressed chassis is not even properly welded. Horror.

If you want the original thing, here it is:

PHILIPS CDV 400

ANYTHING AT ALL ?????
Unfortunately - absolutely nothing. Not one single point.

The only contribution from Theta is the luxury front panel - quite nice, and the bypass from the SP/DIF generator chip to the output PCB. They add some sort of buffer which forms SP/DIF.



Above- Theta's only contribution is the square  PCB which forms the SP/DIF output signal. They call it reclocking, but there is no quartz or clock, so I guess it is just a gate buffer.



There is a normal usual set of CD player Philips brand chips like in every 50 Euro Philips CD - decoder SAA7310 and digital filter SAA7220p/B





Above you can see how Theta steals the sp/dif and clock signals from the saa 7220 chip in a bypass fashion a'la Fikus.

Here is what Stereophile wrote:

Back to the real world of Theta (digital done right !!!)

The SP/DIF is taken from leg 14th of SAA7220  (as it should have been) and some kind of 74HCXXXX digital chip replicates the square wave. The identity of that chip is removed by Theta genius engineer who knows no better but to scratch off the chip identity, oh puhlleeeze!.  it is a 20 cent worth of electronics.  It even has own transformer (3 dollars) and a regulator - another half buck. So the electronic contribution from Theta is worth maximum 5 dollars. OK, maybe 7.




Above: I added the Tantalum 100 uF / 16 V cap across the power supply of the SAA7220 to improve the squareness of SP/DIF signal.

I am ready to forgive Theta the whole stupid story if the extra board makes the stock Philips sound like the Theta Legend should. If their board for 7 dollars is doing the trick - I don't mind. Thats the way to do it. But what if it doesn't ?

I expect the laser disc mechanism to be very good for normal CD playback  because the servo and motor are better  than the ones we find in regular players.  The torque of that motor is 30 times bigger than that of a normal CD motor. In this player - the motor comes from Sony and the laser comes also from Sony (in my wet dream I visualized a gigantic CDM1 magnetic swing arm mechanism from Philips  ;-)













Khs130A laser assembly




There is also another laser disk article about the Pioneer

Who knows, maybe we small mortals can buy the stock laser disk from Philips (or any other really) on ebay and do the SP/DIF bypass, maybe even add a fet buffer. So we can enjoy the sound of Theta without the bloody legend and attached price tag. I guess Laser disc can be bought today for less than 100 Euro, even wooden Pioneer Elite. And you can buy the video disks for nothing and watch them on TV.






Above: the Philips  player removed from inside of the Theta - just like the Alien out of Sigourney Weaver's guts. Theta my ass, that's my message to them.

Listening to Theta Data Universal 2 with Tube Satch 2.9 (nicknamed The Bitch 1.0) converter and compared to stock Kenwood DP 8010 cd player as transport.

Theta player without Theta PCB contribution