Technics SH-X1000

Rare combo which didn't make a single dent into the established high-end bestsellers of the time (Sony CDP-R1 & DAS-R1) and the emerging non-japanese drive+dac combos like those from Krell, Proceed & Mark Levinson or the late California Audio Labs.

Although very well-built, the star of the show wasn't the SL-Z1000 drive but the SH-X1000 converter. Matsushita was touting its MASH structure as top of the audiophile pops and put a lot of research money into it to prove its point.

MASH, aka Multi-StAge Noise-SHaping, was to be the answer to the problems of multi-bit converters but isn't like Philips' slightly later Bitstream answer : MASH is a Pulse WIDTH Modulation system, Bitstream is a Pulse DENSITY Modulation.

Both systems chop words down to a smaller size to decode them at a faster pace but MASH relies on 4x oversampling digital filter, 1st and 2nd order noise-shapers, a further 8x oversampling scaling down to 11-step quantized for the 768x oversampling PWM converter (33,868MHz) which produces 18-bit data.

The need to have absolutely exact signal pulse width requires a complete absence of notch distortion and drastic build quality.
Simpler than multi-bit but not so simple to implement in the end and not really 1-bit - Philips' Bitstream, really 1-bit and really simpler, won the market.

Despite the efforts, the SL-Z1000 and SH-X1000 sold rather quite very poorly and often wound up heavily discounted long after they had vanished from the official catalogs.



For detailed comparisons of the various d/a schemes available, please refer to this page.