Pioneer PD-F51 CD Changer Review

If you’re in the market for a new CD player, chances are you’re looking for a changer. And it’s easy to see why CD changers have become so popular. Aside from the convenience of providing extended musical programs of your own choice, most changers offer all the “bells and whistles” of typical single-play machines at little or no increase in price (or sacrifice of performance).

Pioneer’s PD-F51 is distinctly different from other CD changers we have tested. For one thing, it is remarkably compact and does not look like the others. It is relatively deep and narrow, and it has a small front panel that has fewer control buttons than most other players. For another, it holds up to twenty-five discs in each of its two hinged internal magazines while retaining a front-panel slot for loading a single disc (No. “0”) manually. The changer comes with an infrared remote control, which is not only handier to use than the front-panel buttons but is also required for programming some of the special operating modes.

Almost the entire front panel of the PD-F51 hinges down (manually) to reveal two side-by-side disc magazines, or “racks,” each of which hinges forward individually at the touch of a button to expose its twenty-five disc slots. The discs are loaded on edge, with their label sides facing to the right. After a magazine is loaded, it is pushed upward to latch it in place.

After the changer is loaded, its front panel can be hinged upward manually, revealing its display window surrounded by a number of control buttons of various sizes and shapes. These buttons include a power switch, an eject button for the “Plus One” slot (the single-play disc position), and others that operate the basic transport functions: fast forward or reverse skipping or scanning, play, pause, and stop.

Other buttons switch the display between the elapsed time on the current track and the total playing time of the disc and program the machine to play all tracks on a disc or a single track. Three “Custom” modes enable a user to play any of the tracks on any of the discs (up to fifty selections) in any desired sequence. In the random-play mode, the changer can be set to randomize the tracks on a single disc or to randomly select discs as well as tracks (to a maximum of fifty tracks).

Aside from its special programming features, the PD-F51 operates much like any conventional CD player. For many, if not most, operations, we found its remote control to be easier and more convenient to use than the front-panel buttons. Unlike most other CD players, however, the PD-F51 does not display the total number of tracks or the remaining time (on either the current track or the disc), offering only the current track and disc number, the elapsed time in that track, and the total playing time of the disc.

The PD-F51 also has an ADLC (automatic digital level controller) feature that can be activated by a front-panel button to deal with the problem of level variation from disc to disc, which can cause an unwelcome jump in volume after a disc change. Apparently the ADLC is a compression circuit (it did reduce the output from high-level passages, although we generally preferred not to use it).

Another interesting feature is the “Power-On Demo” that can be activated on start-up to demonstrate all the possible displays that can appear in the front panel window. Since in normal (unprogrammed) operation the display is rather sparse, this feature is quite useful and informative. The PDFS 1 was designed for compatibility with other Pioneer components, including tape decks with the CD Deck Synchro function (for synchronized taping of selected CD tracks) and components designed for System Remote Control (which enables a single remote to control the CD player as well as the other system components).

Clearly, the Pioneer PD-F51 is a different sort of CD player in its design and operating features, but what about its performance? Playback frequency response was very flat, within 0.1 dB overall from below 15 Hz to 9 kHz and down a mere 0.5 dB at 20 kHz. The level difference between channels was a minute 0.04 dB. Maximum output level was about 0.38 volt (1.5 dB) above the 2-volt standard, but that’s not enough to cause any problems. Distortion was low, typically about 0.003 percent at a 0-dB (maximum) level from 20 Hz to 2 kHz and less than 0.006 percent up to 17 kHz. At 1 kHz the distortion was well under 0.003 percent at all levels.

Low-level linearity of the digital-to-analog (D/A) converters was excellent (typical of 1-bit converters, although Pioneer does not specifically identify that design detail). Even at -90 dB the amplitude error was less than 0.4 dB. And the measured dynamic range was outstanding.

The change cycle for discs in the same magazine section (Nos. 1-25 or Nos. 26-50), took less than 2.1 seconds (considerably less for adjacent discs). Not unexpectedly, the time was appreciably longer when a magazine change was required, about 10 seconds from Position 1 to Position 26.

Although the PD-F51 is relatively heavy, and appears to be solidly constructed in its operating mechanism and related parts, its top/side cover is a comparatively light-gauge piece of aluminum. We found that a moderate slap on the cover could induce a momentary mistracking dropout. The changer was able to play through relatively large gaps in the information layer, however, up to 2,000 micrometers in length, without mistracking audibly.

The PD-F51 is very easy and logical to use once you have read the instructions. The twenty-page manual is clear and explicit, but it must be read and understood, in combination with some hands-on practice, if you wish to make use of many of the player’s special features. Unexpectedly, I found the single-disc playback capability to be one of the most useful features. Just insert a disc partway, and it is silently drawn inside and played. When the eject button is pressed, the disc reappears silently and can be withdrawn. The absence of a sliding single-disc drawer makes this feature especially attractive.

My only real complaint about the design (and it is a minor one) concerns the display’s inability to show disc, track, and time information simultaneously. Overall, the Pioneer PD-F51 is an impressive combination of imaginative design and function, with as near to state-of-the-art performance in most respects as we have seen and with no significant design or operational weaknesses.

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