Marantz CDA-94

The CDA-94 is a Philips component in disguise : not a similar thing, not a sibling, not an upgraded version but a DAC960 from top to bottom.

Single Philips TDA1541A d/a, coaxial 75 Ohm digital inputs & output, two big EI trafos plus one toroidal with multiple windings and regulations, "ELNA for Hi-Fi" caps and a digital monitoring loop for the upcoming DAT recorders. Also present is an output volume knob linked to the variable analogue outputs ; it hides a 2-gang ALPS pot.
All this sits in the same aluminium dieecast chassis as that of the CD-94.

The right-side display can show input ("1", "2" or "OPT") in faked alphanumerical dots.

An optical input was already present but not yet of TOS (Toshiba) format for the first batch - TOS, in 1986/87, wasn't yet completed and accepted by the EIAJ...
The Philips original, however, had regular TOS right from the start !

If the integrated CD-94 CD player sold much better, the CDA did power the same circuits as that of the latter with much more juice.
It is however strange Marantz didn't include the Silver Crown TDAs or even dual d/a circuits and ony made a direct rebadge of the DAC960...
What separates the latter from its Marantz version are much more inviting looks and a slightly wider chassis.

Marantz in Japan however quickly changed the color of the CDA-94 from black to champagne but kept export models black (mostly).

As Marantz had other lineups in mind in the later 1980s and early 1990s, no version of the CDA-94 was later made that had TDA1541A S1 or TDA1541A S2 d/a chips so the only higher-end versions of the CDA-94 are the CDA-12 (Marantz outside Japan) and LHH1002 (Philips in Japan), both being strict equivalents of each other and both being from 1988 : three toroidal trafos, even bigger PS filtering and... two TDA1541A S1.



Nudies aplenty of a DAC960 (aka CDA-94) here.