Harman Kardon HD500 CD-player Review

Harman Kardon’s HD 500 Compact Disc player appears disarmingly simple and basic compared with some of the more elaborate units currently on the market. It is tastefully styled to match other HK audio components, with a satin-finish pale-gold main control panel. A contrasting black strip contains the front-loading motorized disc drawer, three small control buttons, and a display window.

Two of the pushbuttons on the black strip are used to store track selections in the player’s memory and to clear the memory. During play, the third button toggles the display between the current track/ index numbers and the elapsed time (in minutes and seconds) within the current track. When the player is turned on and a disc is loaded into its drawer, the display first shows the total playing time of the disc, then the total number of tracks. To the left of the numerical display, illuminated words show when a disc has been loaded, whether it is playing, and the status of the memory and repeat functions.

Flat keys control the basic functions of track stepping and fast scanning (with sound audible) in either direction. A single touch on one of the track keys moves the laser pickup to the start of the next track or back to the start of the current track. When a scanning key is pressed, the playing point advances or recedes at a moderate rate for a few seconds, then speeds up to a rate several times as fast. The repeat button causes the player to repeat the entire disc or any programmed sequence until it is pressed again. The a-b button provides a programmable phrase-repeat function.

A large (double-width) key marked play/pause toggles between the play and pause modes. Somewhat unconventionally, the HD500 does not have a dedicated (or identified) stop key. The play/pause key must be held in for at least 2 seconds to stop the playing of a disc.

The front panel also contains a stereo headphone jack, a small knob to adjust the playing level (for both the headphones and line output), and the pushbutton power switch. The output phono jacks are on the rear apron.

Like some other deluxe CD players, the Harman Kardon HD500 comes with a wireless infrared remote control. The simplicity of the front-panel controls makes the remote equally easy to use, in sharp contrast with some remotes we have seen that are designed to control other system components also, thereby increasing the likelihood of mistakes.

The Harman Kardon HD500 measures 17-1/2 inches wide, 13-1/4 inches deep, and 4 inches high, and it weighs 12-3/4 pounds. Price: $600.

Lab Tests

The frequency response of the HD500 was almost perfectly flat, varying less than 0.1 dB overall from 20 to 8,000 Hz. There was a very small high-frequency rise, to a maximum of +0.3 to +0.4 dB at 18,500 Hz, and a return to the reference level at 20,000 Hz. The levels of the two channels were identical.

The square-wave response of the player showed that it uses digital low-pass filtering to remove ultrasonic components from the output of its D/A (digital-to-analog) converter. The maximum output from a 0-dB recorded level was 2.34 volts into an EIA-standard load.

The interchannel phase shift, which was only a few degrees in the 100- to 1,000-Hz range, rose at higher frequencies to 40 degrees at 20.000 Hz. The fact that the phase shift doubled with each octave increase in frequency above 5,000 Hz indicates a time difference of about 5.5 microseconds between channels, suggesting that the player uses two-times oversampling but a single D/A converter multiplexing between channels. The manual states, however, that the HD500 uses a 44.1-kHz sampling rate.

When we measured the phase shift on an oscilloscope, we noticed an appreciable amount of ultrasonic frequency content superimposed on audio tones between 10,000 and 20.000 Hz. Spectrum analysis showed that these ultrasonic components resulted from beats between the signal frequency and the 44.1-kHz sampling frequency. In the worst case, at 20,000 Hz, the spurious 24,100-Hz component was at a — 20-dB level. Evidently the low-pass filters were not able to remove these inaudible components sufficiently from the D/A converter’s output.

The playback distortion at 1,000 Hz was slightly higher than we have measured from other CD players. It decreased from 0.032 percent at 0 dB to 0.008 percent at —20 dB, and it was not affected by the setting of the output-level control. The listening volume with medium-impedance headphones was excellent. The noise level was very low, —97.7 dB unweighted and —101 dB with A-weighting. The channel separation was 82.5 dB at 100 Hz, narrowing steadily at higher frequencies until it reached 56.5 dB at 20,000 Hz.

The laser pickup slewed from Track 1 to Track 15 of the Philips TS4 test disc in 5 seconds, not as fast as some players we have tested but certainly fast enough for any normal use. The transition from Track 17 to Track 18 of that disc, which are not separated by any silent interval, was made flawlessly. The player’s resistance to physical shock was reasonably good but not exceptional. Tapping its top with the fingers usually had no effect on the playback, but a light slap with the palm often caused the player to mistrack.

Comments

It is an interesting commentary on the state of the audio art that the near-perfect electrical performance of most CD players makes even the smallest departure from that degree of refinement seem like a flaw. We refer specifically to the measured distortion—and, to a lesser degree, the channel separation—of the Harman Kardon HD500. After all, no analog program source has distortion as low as ten times the 0.032 percent that we measured from the HD500 at 0 dB. Yet the fact that the distortion of many other CD players is a fraction of that figure, and that HK’s own specification is 0.01 percent, may make it seem that the HD500 is less than it should be. Similarly, the best analog sources are likely to have 40 to 50 dB less separation at any frequency than we measured from the HD500.

Quibbling about this sort of discrepancy seems to us like an unreasonably perfectionist attitude. There was nothing in the audible performance of the HD500 less than equal to the best CD players we have heard. It is likely that those people who condemn digital sound per se will object to the sound of the HD500, but they would do that even if it were literally perfect. Anyone who normally enjoys listening to CD’s will surely be pleased by what comes out of the HD500.

The HD500 is an uncommonly easy-to-use, logically designed product, and a handsome one to boot. It was a pleasure to be able to operate it without squinting at a host of small, crowded buttons or keys. It has all the controls it needs, and the others will not be missed. Except for its unusual method of stopping play, the HD500 can be used with a high probability of success before reading the instruction manual.

We also note with approval the inclusion of a playback-level control, which seems at last to be an expected feature of a good CD player. Finally, the remote control was not only able to operate the player reliably over distances of 20 feet or more, but it would even function when its infrared beam was bounced off a wall instead of being aimed directly at the HD500.

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