Philips DVD-963SA, DVP-900SA, DVD-763SA: some talks with Mr. Victor Tan

In consideration of the vast market success of the Philips DVD-963SA, we had the curiosity to understand what its successor would be like so we had the pleasure to reach Mr. Victor Tan at Philips.
Victor is Product Manager of the 963sa, therefore he’s the leader of the Singapore-based project team that gave birth to this player, so we had an occasion to exchange our points of view on this machine, on its legacy and on its younger brother – the DVD-763SA.
One thing that really pleased us was that our tests found a confirmation on the project side. The character of the 963 for instance, that does not impress at a first listening but that comes out day by day (and this might well explain why most of our readers who didn’t get a very good impression of the 963 said this after a short listening test).

Victor was very kind at answering all the questions that we had for him.
First of all he told us the successor of the 963 will be the DVP-900SA, another video-DVD, SACD and CD player (no audio-DVD of course).
Going into details he added that this machine will have updated video quality: the Faroudja chip will be kept, while the video section D/A converter will be a 216Mhz – 12bit device. The audio section will not undergo major changes, and I wish to add this denotes a specific commitment by the manufacturer and not a one-shot result.
In my opinion, the new video chipsets might strengthen the 900SA in playing VideoDVDs with standards other than Progressive PAL scan, the sole task where - according to our tests - the 963SA was only an average performer.

Mail to our magazine and Forum talks showed a number of claims about 963 reliability, especially on the pick-up side. By the way, Philips resellers and Service here in Italy proved to be very kind and efficient in replacing or fixing their gears and also fully applied the international warranty to machines purchased abroad. The good news from Singapore is that the 900SA will have a better loader, and I expect this will solve most of the problems we’ve experienced so far.

We also learnt that the official price of the 900SA will be close to that of the 963SA. In my opinion this factor, along with the similar philosophy, chipsets and model code means that 963 owners won’t see their machines get suddenly obsolete (therefore unworthy) like it happened to some multi-standard players by other large brands.

Going back to the development of the 963SA project, Victor recalled the amount of listening tests by a panel of musicians and audiophiles from his team deployed to fine-tune the I/P conversion and analog circuit of the 963SA. They worked, among other tuning tasks, on the good match with the AD1955 chipset. This chip is one of the causes behind the good performance of the 963, though according to our friend in Singapore (and I personally agree) it tends to be very open and bright, so that a machine that uses it needs to be thoroughly tuned up.

The 963SA went out of production and also actually out of stock here in Europe, therefore some audiophiles have started contemplating its younger brother DVD-763SA as an alternative. According to some listening tests and catalog specifications we had already pointed out that the two machines are not close performers. This found a confirmation by Victor that explained that the 763 is an entry-level gear with no Faroudja chip or high-quality video DAC on board, and has not the AD1955 so that it relies on the CS4392 for all audio channels. The 963 uses the latter for center and surround only, please see our test in No.5 of Videohifi. The 763SA didn’t take advantage of a tune-up as intensive as the one described above, either: it did actually have a short audio "tuning" but not so extensive.

Talking about tune-up sessions, Victor also mentioned some 963 laboratory prototypes that bore higher quality components, and that sounded even better than the final release though they didn’t hit the market. I think it is important to consider that there is a number of factors other like pure performance - such as reliability, manufacturing costs and so on - to be taken into consideration when producing a machine.
Nevertheless, I hope that in the future I’ll get some indications from Victor about those prototypes for our tweaking enthusiasts…