PIONEER DV-545 — A High Value-for-Money Machine That Surpasses Dedicated CD Players in the LOW-END

Well… my motto is never to come away empty-handed from a stumble, so returning from the shop that sold me the Nakamichi CD changer with nothing to show for it felt rather awkward — not least out of consideration for the shop itself. So I cast my eye over the other items on offer to see if there was anything I could use instead, and that was when I spotted the Pioneer DVD player DV-545, which had been sold a couple of years earlier. My parents had also been wanting something to play their Winter Sonata DVDs on, so I bought it as a substitute for the returned item and brought it home.

Actually, this DV-545 was something I had been very keen on ever since four years ago, when I still didn’t own a dedicated DVD player. Apparently it was, at the time, the world’s slimmest player at just 55 mm tall. The street price was around ¥20,000–25,000, and as a pioneer of the affordable, slim DVD player that could slip into even the tightest rack space, it had a fine reputation for picture quality — and beyond that, it had attracted something of a reputation in certain quarters as a player with “excellent sound quality”. I was seriously tempted to buy one on the strength of those sound-quality rumours, but in the end I didn’t, partly because it couldn’t play the DVD-RAM media used by my main DVD recorder, the Toshiba RD-XS40. Because its production run was short, searching for reviews online turns up almost nothing — and in particular, anything focusing on sound quality is virtually non-existent.

Issue 102 of the magazine Audio Accessory carried a review of this player — a rare distinction for a budget model outside the realm of high-end AV equipment aimed at serious enthusiasts — and I shall quote from that article here. ※ Back issues of Audio Accessory are available here.

“I have given up on dedicated CD players. The Pioneer DVD player DV-545 serves as my substitute. Beyond its DVD video capabilities, it handles CD-R, CD-RW, and MP3 on the CD side. The sound of DVD video linear PCM is impressive, and CD playback quality is excellent. What particularly struck me was the quality in DVD video linear PCM mode — genuinely smooth and well-balanced. Checking CD playback at low levels, both -60 dB and -80 dB performed well. The standard achieved is every bit a match for dedicated CD players in the same price bracket, if not better. Many enthusiasts are quick to point out the limitations of multi-format players, but the pace of technical progress is truly relentless. Past difficulties are being steadily overcome…”

…A rather promising read, all things considered.

Picking it up in person, it feels even smaller than the 55 mm height suggests — the depth is only 28 cm as well. At 2.5 kg, it is featherlight; touch one of the buttons and the whole chassis shifts. But for someone like me, living in a rabbit hutch and fond of small, compact things, that smallness is exactly what I like. The design is as you can see: symmetrical, simple, and rather well-balanced.

So, I connected it to the sub-system in my study, which normally runs a CEC TL5100Z CD player in the ¥150,000 class. As for the sound — within the first three seconds I was thinking, oh! This is something. I can say without reservation that the sound quality is excellent. Given the price, it is enough to make you want to jump for joy. Even as I write this review it is playing behind me, and the fact that I feel no significant dissatisfaction is remarkable. First of all, the basic level of information retrieval is properly there. For a CD player in this class to render the sonic details in a pop recording — the little production tricks, the vibrato in a classical performance — this clearly and crisply is something I have rarely, if ever, heard from an entry-level model before. Is this the generational gap showing through — progress in digital conversion accuracy, perhaps?

With budget-range CD players for hi-fi use, or standalone CD players bundled with mini component systems, there tend to be many models that use clever tonal colouration and balance to present a pleasing listen, but leave you wondering about actual quality once you dig deeper. The DV-545, by contrast, is almost too straightforward in its tonal character — a touch bland, one might say — but in return it offers very little colouration, a fresh and nearly transparent sound quality, and a solid, honest rendering with no corners cut, which I find very appealing.

I had actually been expecting something more in the Pioneer mould — a refined, slightly shadowed yet vivid sound — but in the best possible sense, this player confounded those expectations entirely. It is very natural and dynamic, bright and unconstrained in its delivery. The presentation is straight and direct, so it lacks a little in suppleness and sensuous warmth, yet the high frequencies extend naturally without much sense of distortion, and the sheer quantity of basic information on offer gives the impression of a well-bred machine that might well blossom with a little care.

The tonal balance, as heard, feels slightly weighted towards the upper-midrange — possibly related to the lightness of the chassis. It is not so much that the bass is weak, as that the overall character is a touch lightweight. That said, the density of sound, the sense of pace, and the drive across the frequency range are all solid, giving the musical expression a surprisingly generous sense of scale. Somewhat unexpected from such a slim box. Which perhaps means this is a voicing deliberately suited to driving small speakers — or dare I say television speakers — with a sense of scale?

If I were to look for a quirk, it would be the occasional faint whiff of a plasticky touch to the texture of string instruments, piano, and female vocals. This was similar to the DAC section of the Pioneer PDR-D5 I owned previously, so it may well be a characteristic of the D/A converter fitted. That said, standalone CD players at this price level tend to have rather worse issues in the same direction, so it is hardly a problem worth dwelling on. In classical music this does contribute to a slightly surface-level impression lacking in depth, but conversely, with Japanese pop, anime songs, and rock, that tonal character and liveliness feel like a natural match — the most important frequency range for vocals and melody comes through with clarity, distortion is low, and soundstage imaging and focus are well-controlled — all of which makes this player feel thoroughly sufficient, to the point where one wonders whether anything more is really needed.

Thinking I might remedy the slight lightness in the sound, I tried placing the heavy CEC TL5100Z on top of it — and while this did firm up the structure of the sound to some degree, the result was a rather uninteresting, generic tonal character. It seems this is another model where its compactness and lightness are, if anything, part of what gives it musical character.

Writing all this might give the impression that it is just a cheap product after all — but what it has, and what many other entry-level players lack, is a quality I would describe as “the necessary things are actually there, and you can actually hear them”: resolution, focus and structure in the sound image, a transparent soundstage, a sense of scale, and the decay of reverb tails. Rather than buying a half-hearted CD player at a budget price where the manufacturer has papered over the cracks with brand-characteristic colouration, I think you would achieve a much higher standard of sound — within the same limited budget — by using the DV-545 for digital output in the meantime and directing your funds towards the amplifier, speakers, and cables.

Now, to fully appreciate the DV-545’s honest information retrieval and its underlying quality in the way I have described, a certain degree of care is needed. The character is crisp and well-bred, but straight out of the box the balance leans a little towards the upper registers and the tonal depth is somewhat lacking. To draw out its true potential, the supplied phono cable simply will not do. Having tried several separately purchased RCA cables from my collection, the best match by far was the Red Rose Music 1934, designed by Mark Levinson — though it does cost rather more than the player itself. ※ This cable is also now discontinued.

The quiet, delicate tonal character of the Red Rose Music 1934 reins in the DV-545’s tendency towards excessive dynamism, and the cable’s fine resolution towards the high frequencies — reminiscent of an electrostatic speaker — marries beautifully with the DV-545’s own resolving ability. The result is a clear, refined sound quality that belies the price class, and that holds up even with classical music. The Red Rose Music 1934 is a notoriously fussy cable that is very particular about its partners: connect it to any component with even a trace of distortion and it amplifies that distortion like an effect, producing something quite unlistenable — which, with budget equipment, is more often the case than not. The fact that the Pioneer DV-545 presents no such problem at all speaks volumes about the fundamental sonic competence of this DVD player.

That said, it need not be the rare and hard-to-find Red Rose Music 1934 — something in the range of a few thousand yen to around ¥10,000 retail will do, as long as it is a properly high-quality cable. Connecting a decent RCA cable is what allows the Pioneer DV-545 to realise its latent potential. Given how inexpensive the unit itself is, spending Hi-Fi-grade money on an RCA cable may feel like an awkward allocation of funds — but I do think it is worth indulging the player to that extent before passing judgement on what it can do.

Next, the C7 figure-of-eight mains cable. Do not be fooled by it being a mere thin figure-of-eight power lead — even among supplied cables there are audible differences in both sound and picture depending on which one you use. At present I have the one supplied with the Toshiba RD-XS40 plugged in, having found it the better match, and the polarity makes a noticeable difference to the character as well. Upgrading to a higher-quality figure-of-eight mains cable should bring a deeper, more stable tonal foundation in the bass.

All in all, this was a genuinely excellent purchase — price included (being second-hand, it came to roughly a third of the original retail price). The DV-545 is compact enough to sit anywhere without getting in the way, and its versatility as a proper DVD player beyond music playback is another advantage. At this level of sound quality it could also serve perfectly well as a CD transport for occasional use such as CD-R production. Adding a decent standalone D/A converter as an upgrade could make for an interesting experiment too. As for DVD picture quality, it looked better than its price to my eyes — quite strikingly so. At the very least, both picture and sound are a step above the DVD recorder I normally use, the Toshiba RD-XS40 (with built-in HDD recorder). The DV-545 apparently suffers from chroma errors if you look closely, but for a player at this price point, an overall pleasing picture can be reason enough to overlook such details.

It is already discontinued, but as a common DVD player produced in runs of 25,000 units per month, examples should not be too hard to find at Yahoo! Auctions or second-hand Hi-Fi dealers. As mentioned earlier, if you want reasonably good sound but cannot spend heavily overall, using a capable DVD player like this while directing your budget towards the amplifier and other components is a perfectly valid approach. When it comes to sourcing both an amplifier and a CD player from overseas brands, the combined cost can mount up rather more than one might expect, and in particular CD players from abroad tend to offer worse value for money compared to Japanese equivalents. In such cases, rather than compromising on the integrated amplifier, pairing a musically expressive compact speaker with a high-value slim multi-format player like this one for the time being should make it possible to realise a genuinely impressive compact Hi-Fi system on a tight budget and in fairly short order. There are also surely many owners who already have a Pioneer DV-545 but have never quite noticed how surprisingly good it sounds. It might be worth taking this opportunity to reconsider how you use it, even if only as a bit of fun with a secondary system.

After this, once the Blu-ray era arrived, I moved on to the Pioneer BDP-3140.

Incidentally, the current 2005 model, the Pioneer DV-578A, appears to be even more compact, priced at under ¥20,000, and capable of playing DVD-Audio and SACD as well. As for the sound — the drive mechanism and DAC chip are all entirely different, so it is genuinely hard to say, but given that it is still a digital playback machine, I find myself quietly hoping it might deliver a sound with a certain degree of refinement, given that I still don’t own an SACD player of my own.

That said, looking at what people have written online, there are a fair number of reviews saying the picture quality is quite good but the mechanical noise is dreadful, and the sound quality is below that of the Toshiba RD-X3 — which gives me pause. Comparing the DV-545 (which runs very quietly) with the RD-XS40 — the younger sibling of the RD-X3 — on CD playback in my own environment, the difference in refinement is plainly audible even listening through the television, so this one makes me hesitate. Hmm… I would very much like to hear from someone who owns a DV-578 about how it sounds on CD and SACD.