My friend just picked up 2 Philips SACD 1000 players and hooked his up to an Outlaw 1050. He gets subwoofer output from DVD movies and cable TV sources but not in SACD mode.

I checked the unit's specs and reviews out and found the following in Stereophile - my question, what does this mean? Does it mean you cannot use the ICBM with the Philips 1000 in SACD mode? Does it mean the Outlaw 1050 will not output any discrete subwoofer signal if the Philips is in SACD mode?

Help!


"The SACD1000, unlike the Technics DVD-A10, will not output PCM of any bit-rate from its digital jacks—not even from standard CDs! The only signals at those jacks are for DTS or AC-3. Thus, no external high-quality DAC or digital processing device can perform any upsampling, control tone or balance, or—most important for multichannel use—manage the bass unless it redigitizes the analog signals."

"And how about the DTS and AC-3 signals? DTS is digital-out only since the SACD-1000 does not incorporate a DTS decoder."

"The SACD-1000 will decode AC-3 and output it as high quality analog. However, internal decoding means bypassing the speaker/bass management in the pre/pro, so I prefer using the digital output as the default for both DTS and AC-3. But, whatever your preference, for AC-3 you must connect both analog and digital links and switch between them in order to use all the capabilities of the SACD-1000."

"But that's not all! The SACD-1000 does have facilities for speaker setup and bass management but these are effective only for audio from DVD-Video (Dolby Digital, Digital Surround, Dolby ProLogic, and a 3D-Sound mode that simulates surround from two speakers). Because the SACD-1000's speaker and bass management is ineffective on the analog outputs from all SACDs, you must use full-range loudspeakers on all channels. There's no way to tell the SACD-1000 to re-route bass signals from a small loudspeaker into a subwoofer or to create a phantom center channel."

"Moreover, you'd better have a subwoofer for the LFE (low-frequency effects) channel no matter how big and extended your main speakers are—there's no way to reroute the LFE signals either! High-end speaker/bass management in the analog domain is rare (TMH is promising one derived from their professional models), so you're stuck between redigitizing or no bass management at all. Well, Sony said from the get-go that SACD was the new high-end medium; you'd better ante up with the rest of your system."

What do you all think?!?!?

I typed a reply to this question here a couple of minutes ago. To answer the question in the subject line here, though, it's easy: no issue at all. In fact, this is exactly why the ICBM was created -- because players like the Philips 1000 (and nearly all of the SACD and DVD-Audio players on the market) lack and need bass management.

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