Rebooting The Final Frontier! Sonic Frontiers SFCD-1

The Sonic Frontiers SFCD-1 was produced from 1995 till 2001. It's probably one of the most musical sounding CD players ever made at any price, even by today's standards! One listening an you'll fall in love with it's charms. By today's standard noise floor & resolution would be it's Achilles' heels, but it's golden colored tonality, rhythm & pace,  sheer musicality will get you hooked.

Here is a Sonic Frontiers SFCD-1 which I used to own sometime back in 2005 till 2007, then I sold it to a friend who loved it so much, he sent the unit to Chris Johnson's Parts Connection in Canada to have it retro fitted with SE Plus mods to the player during 2011. In all he blew a cool MYR 10 thousand bucks or so to do it. Worth every single Agung faced Ringgit, he said, upon the return of the SFCD-1 about 3 months later!

Me? The SFCD-1 was actually my first high end CD player. It sounded great in my system, but I took it for granted, I wanted more........... My next CD player was a Marantz CD 16-D which served as an interim player until I lay my hands on a Marantz CD 7, which was the unit I've always wanted. You can read about my adventures or mis-adventures with the Marantz CD 7 in these pages too.

Back to end year 2019, my friend came for a home visit when I told him I had restarted my hifi hobby. He was inspired and went home looking to restart his too. Like me, he too had moth balled his hifi set for a couple of years. Then he told me his system wouldn't start.up. Chiefly, the Sonic Forntiers SFCD-1 wouldn't turn on! He brought the unit to me in hope I could fix it. 

I opened up the player, and found that the main board still powered up, but the control board behind the face plate with the display wasn't. I had deduced my findings to him, that unless I could find a donor board with the E-prom chip still intact. There wasn't anything further I could do for him. He then told me it's OK and I can keep the carcass. The SFCD-1 laid in my place for a few months, until recently I heard that our chief hifi mechanic Mr Oh of Old Klang Road have a working unit of SFT-1(a transport only version of the SFCD-1) for sale. And so I sprung in to action. Looking to buy the SFT-1 to use as a donor machine, or to shop for parts. Mr Oh learned about my intentions and offered to help me with the parts transfer task. Below is a pictoria guide with photos provided by Mr Oh as he did the transfer job!      

The Sonic Frontiers SFCD-1(black face) and SFT-1(gold face) being wheeled in to Mr Oh's surgery room for parts transplant!

Inside the SFT-1, compared to the SFCD-1 below.

Inside the SFCD-1, note the balanced(XLR) output board and the pair of 6922 tubes(NOS Siemens matched pair), and the added on jitter board on top of the Ultra Jitter module as part of the SE Plus upgrade package performed by Chris Johnson, formerly boss & designer of Sonic Frontiers products.

The 2 round stacks of fast recovery diodes in between the blue & gold colored capacitors are also part of the elaborate SE Plus upgrade package! 

Audio output section of the SFCD-1 beefed up with ceramic tube sockets, MCaps and gold pin XLR connectors for the SE Plus upgrade package!

The SE Plus upgrades also includes more power regulators in the power supply section.

After the control board swap, the SFCD-1 came alive again!

While it didn't affect my SFCD-1, a very common problem with these CD players are the board socket pins as circled in red by Mr Oh. Over the years of usage, the pins can become loose and cause shorting of boards, or just becomes loose and the unit stops working! One way is to tightened the socket pins by using a cable tie, or better yet ask Mr Oh to individually remove the pins from the socket, give it a good press to tightened the contact points. A lot of work though. 

During testing of the SFCD-1, Mr Oh also found the CD transport needed replacement, along with the servo board, which is non-standard Philips CDM 12.4. Sonic Frontiers had modified the servo board.

Thankfully, the SFT-1 again provide the required donor CD transport mechanism servo board.....

All fixed and under going final test.

Finally, the Sonic Frontiers SFCD-1 is now singing in my audio cave again.

 

I shall take my time to enjoy my new found SFCD-1. As I listen more to it, the more I love it's golden tonal colors, it's rhythm & pace and slam dunk musical qualities. These are the very things you can't find in modern CD player designs or CAS audio. That's why I believe the Sonic Frontiers SFCD-1 will live on for many, many years to come, and their used resell values will go up, despite their troublesome reputation. They just sound so...... musically good, compared to most modern digital designs which excels mostly in technical parameters, like specifications & measured results!

Now, latest development, my friend just learned that I have rebooted his SFCD-1 and is keen to have it back after he listened to it in my place. Knowing how much he loved his Sonic Frontiers products, I'll let it go back to it's rightful owner for the cost of repairs. What did I get? if you asked, the sheer joy of being reminded why I liked this CD player so much back then! A lovely ending, don't you think so?