<>Copland CDA 289 player

Inside the Copland 289 CDA

Looking inside - you will find the best designed and best laid out construction possible. Everyhing is fantastic.
As a CD doctor I must say this is the best construction I have seen so far, and there are some more solid and more copper-clad CDs out there but they are too much of the good thing. Copland only makes superb things where and when it matters. BRAVO.

It has the mighty musical Burr Brown PCM63K dacs, two per channel in paralell, superb precise clock (no need to install the masterclock), the input digital filter is the famous Pacific Microsonics PMD 100 with a co-processor, and the player has in total  6 power supplies plus two after lampization. It is built like a dream. Like nothing in it's price point. And it looks great, very neat and elegant design. I would argue that aesthetically this has the best taste design of all CD because of its simplicity, ergonomy and elegance.  Like a gentlemen - he knows how to keep low profile  and not flash.
Many high end constructions are real bad-taste monsters. Like Chevy Camaro with tuning and dark windows.

Adding the Sowter transformers after the DACs and before the tubes resulted in fantastic sound, detailed, delicate, mature, musical and clean. The transformers enabled me to make balanced outputs. Bass must be the lowest I ever heard. I don't know if it is the feature of ther DAC chip or the transformers, but  if you wanna really to plumb the depthts of the bass, this player has no equal.





The silver cans are the Sowter transformers amplifying the voltage by 19 times (reducing the current also 19 times).



Heatsinks of power supplies.

Lampiuzator installation in the Copland CD289

Lampizator connected for testing.



The back plate is prepared for drilling - covered with masking tape and all holes are layed out. there is plenty of room for the lampizator devices inside.



I glued the power supply filter capacitors to the transformer body. There are four capacitors plus one main (bottom right corner) - to serve four phases of the signal independently.


Everything is ready except of the tubes. Sockets are installed on 3 cm legs.



Now the tubes are in place. Everything fits perfectly.



The back side after the modification.


The sound is phenomenal. The lows move my entire room. This is the high end at it's limits!

SOWTER TRANSFORMERS mod. 8347   (www.sowter.co.uk)
These UK made signal transformers, based on the permalloy cores, amplify the miniscule signal coming out of the DAC chips to the levels acceptable for the tube stage. The transformers also perform the role of analog filters (get rid of the digital square wave artifacts) and the current to voltage converters.
IMPORTANT NOTE for Sowter users: The factory-provided schematics from Sowter shows the primary winding of the transformer connected in series with the DAC output (current) and paralelled with  one resistor (25 Ohm). This resistor is UN-NECESSARY ! It has no role here. The DAC is happy playing into the transformer winding. No need for the resistor (considered wrongly  by many tweakers to be I/V converter). Remove the resistor and you will get a much more dynamic sound. IMHO that's an error on the Sowter side.