Pioneer SE-Masterl

摘要

Of the Japanese audio manufacturers who chose an anglicised company name, Pioneer surely picked the best. It suggests an enterprise at the cutting edge, always looking to make technological progress, and Pioneer has often justified its aspirational moniker. Many will think of its development of plasma televisions but my mind goes back to its double-speed DAT machines of the early 1990s that afforded many of us our first taste of high sampling-rate audio, and to the digital companding system it developed around the same time to achieve 24-bit resolution using 16-bit hardware. Pioneer has historically been a great supporter of hi-res digital - proof that the commitment continues being its XDP-100R portable player recently becoming the first to support MQA.