SONY System501: Just How Good Is This Compact High-End System?

So, what shall I write about today… Well then, here is a listening report on Sony’s compact hi-fi product, the System501 — a little late to the party, admittedly. This covers the digital amplifier TA-F501 featuring S-Master PRO, the SACD player SCD-X501, and the bookshelf speaker SS-K10ED that comes as the matching set.

When the System501 was first announced, I remember thinking “what on earth is this” at its uncompromisingly square, no-nonsense design. Seeing it in person, though, it has a certain quality to its finish that makes it look rather good — it may well be a product that loses out simply because it photographs badly. The design reminds me somewhat of the KENWOOD K’s series from a decade or so ago, though Sony’s aluminium panels here feel brighter and a touch more refined. The speakers, finished in a high-gloss piano lacquer, look positively premium. Half-size components though they are, nothing about the build quality suggests entry-level audio gear retailing as a set for under ¥200,000.

When I listened to this system, the SS-K10ED — the matching speakers — were connected throughout, so I cannot speak to how it sounds with third-party speakers. With that caveat in mind, what follows are my impressions of the system as a whole. There is no shortage of promotional technical literature, of course, but none of that means much until you actually hear the thing, so please bear with me.

The sound of the System501 is characterised, at its core, by a clarity that is distinctly Sony. It is not exactly natural, but there is a freshness to it, with little sense of any peculiar colouration. The sense of range is moderate — bluntly put, it is on the narrow side. Rather than a vast soundstage extending in depth and height, what you get is a miniature-garden-like presentation where small, clearly defined images form between the speakers even at low volumes. Piano, for instance, has a lustrous, evenly rounded quality that is genuinely appealing. In general, this bright, surface-clear tonal character dominates the mid-to-high frequencies, and one does not come away with any strong impression of great information density or sheer quantity of detail.

For those seeking greater scale, the larger step-up model SS-K30ED is also an option

The speaker design is somewhat reminiscent of the B&W Nautilus 805S, with a ship-hull-shaped, rounded enclosure made using bent-wood construction to reduce standing waves. That alone represents a level of engineering not easily replicated elsewhere. At 348 mm in height the cabinets are on the large side for bookshelf speakers, yet the soundstage they produce is a touch more compact than the cabinet dimensions might lead one to expect.

Rather than chasing Hi-Fi virtues such as deep bass, wide frequency range, or sheer information density, the point here is that any CD or SACD, regardless of recording quality, is presented with a consistent tonal character — tidily and clearly. The tagline is “a component system for grown-ups,” and the impression one gets is that the aim has been to build in a practical, usable sound quality — one where listeners coming from a music-lover’s or general-user’s perspective are unlikely to be troubled by compatibility issues with particular recordings, rather than trying to satisfy the more obsessive Hi-Fi enthusiast.

Because the system is well-behaved and unassuming, never pushing itself to the fore, there are inevitably moments — particularly in the inward-looking, micro-dynamic expression that high-end audio can do so arrestingly, or in fine detail retrieval — where the presentation becomes somewhat one-dimensional, as one might expect at this price. That said, it never falls into the trap (one that Sony products occasionally do) of being so lacking in musical communicativeness as to be truly unsatisfying. The charm of this system, I think, lies in being able to enjoy music at a genuinely good quality level, in a relaxed and approachable way, without the audio equipment itself ever demanding your attention.

On first listen it has that digital-flavoured Sony tonality, but the longer you listen, the more you notice something rather un-Sony about it — a warmth and humanity that, true to the Pure Heart Audio tagline, goes beyond what specifications alone can convey. Incidentally, there is nothing particularly striking about it simply because it is a digital amplifier. If anything, a relative absence of colouration may be characteristic of digital amplification in general, but the sound this system produces has been thoughtfully worked out in an analogue-minded sense, and there is nothing dry or clinical about it — it never loses sight of the music in favour of making surfaces shine.

During the listening session I compared it directly against several high-end systems totalling anywhere from a few million to over ten million yen, and to be honest, in terms of simply and effortlessly enjoying recorded music — as opposed to analysing sound — the balanced, middle-of-the-road sensibility of the TA-F501/SCD-X501/SS-K10ED combination, never straining or overreaching, has an appeal that no high-end model with a more pronounced character in one direction or another can quite replicate. For a music lover with no particular obsession with audio, I found myself feeling that they would be better served putting together a SONY SYSTEM501 rather than venturing into expensive Hi-Fi and becoming hopelessly lost. There are, for instance, certain radio-cassette players and BOSE products that, precisely because of their limited detail and narrow range, can be listened to enjoyably for hours on end with any recording in any room — the System501, I would argue, is a product that retains those practical virtues of more affordable, non-audiophile equipment, while raising the standard of sound quality to a properly contemporary hi-fi level.

The obvious rival is Denon’s PMA-CX3/DCD-CX3/SC-CX303, and compared to that combination, the DENON is frankly the better-sounding system. Both share a Japanese-product character — clear, relatively uncoloured — and in basic personality they are not entirely dissimilar, but in terms of decay and sustain, soundstaging, frequency range, and information density, the PMA-CX3/DCD-CX3 does feel a class above. That said, the System501 retails as a set for around ¥110,000–120,000, while the DENON CX series runs to ¥180,000–200,000 (excluding speakers) — a price difference of nearly double, which makes for a less than entirely fair comparison. Even so, the gap in cost does seem to translate directly into a gap in quality.

If you are looking for a domestic-brand system for near-field listening at low volumes in a study or bedroom, or as a secondary system, either would serve you well without any fundamental misgivings. That said, the author’s own feeling is this: if budget permits, or if this system is to serve as a main system, go with the DENON CX series. On the other hand, if you already have a full-size Hi-Fi system or home cinema elsewhere, or if you would rather put your money into building a CD/SACD collection than into the equipment itself, or simply if you have no confidence at all in setting up and optimising audio gear — in those cases, the Sony System501 is what I would recommend. The Denon, in all likelihood, is the sort of system that can lead you down something of a rabbit hole when it comes to setup and optimisation.

I was not able to check this during the listening session (various high-end cables had been fitted throughout, and I suspect the manufacturer’s representative had also applied room correction in advance), but the TA-F501 does include an automatic room correction function — D.C.A.C. It measures speaker distance, volume, and polarity using the supplied stereo microphone, then applies a 6-band parametric equaliser to correct frequency response and minimise the effects of standing waves and the like on sound quality, thereby improving stereo imaging and ambience and allowing the equipment to perform to its full potential. This feature is designed to make the best of settings that are not ideal for audio — on top of a bookshelf, a chest of drawers, or a bay window ledge, for instance — so that music can still be enjoyed properly in the kinds of constrained, everyday domestic spaces where conditions are far from optimal.

And then there is the Super Audio CD player, the SCD-X501. At a retail price of around ¥50,000–60,000, it may well be one of the better hi-fi SACD players in its price bracket. To begin with, there was absolutely none of the poor CD-layer sound quality that has been reported of certain Sony models (the review above was conducted almost entirely using CDs). And it seems likely to sound considerably more respectable than a universal player in a similar price range built on a DVD transport. I have not compared them directly, so I cannot say anything too definitive, but — taking into account the benefit of its compact footprint — for someone who cannot quite stretch to a high-end SACD player capable of truly demonstrating what the format can do, yet finds the sound quality of a multi-format player under ¥100,000 simply too much of a compromise, this strikes me as quite an interesting option even as a secondary machine dedicated to SACD playback.