An interview with Gary Morrison of Plinius

CD designing man

By Michael Jones

January 2005

With the launch of the Plinius CD-101 compact disc player - the company's first foray into digital sound - AudioEnz thought it appropriate to quiz the man behind Plinius designs. Gary Morrison discusses the thinking and design the Plinius CD-101 (also reviewed this month).

Plinius must be one of the very last hi-fi electronic companies to have produced a CD player. Why did it take so long, and why now?

gary Morrison Well we're mostly known for our amplifiers, and that is our core business. However the introduction of Ross Stevens as our Industrial Designer, and the new Plinius look that he developed left us mismatched with most source components. We began getting requests for a CD Player to match almost as soon as the new look products were released.

Can you describe the internals of the player - DAC, disc drive etc?

The "loader" is a computer part. A specially selected CD-ROM drive to be exact. One with certain characteristics in the drive motor, acoustic properties etc. It is run at 8x the speed that an audio CD "loader" would run at, and the raw data is buffered as it is read. The DAC is based around Burr Brown parts, and expensive ones too! The parts used are available to anyone in the industry, but we like to think that the way we have used them and the way we have supported them with power supply design etc has made them perform beyond what might be expected.

Is it becoming more difficult to procure components for specialised CD players these days?

It certainly is. We went through 12 months of frustration trying to source specific audio loaders. The market has dried up now and most support SACD and DVD etc. We actually tried a DVD loader, but we couldn't get a good sonic result from it.

Could you take us through the development process for the CD-101.

Sure. We first needed to decide on the loader as mentioned above. Until we had that we couldn't really identify what we would need to interface with it. Once we had that decided we set of on several paths in parallel. One was the design of the player mechanically. That was based around the loader and Ross's ideas to support that and fit it into our new look range.

Second was the control of the loader and human interface. This was specified following a lot of discussion, and then refined over time. This work was done by Scott Hunter, our factory test technician, who has a skill with microprocessors. He had to reverse engineer the control interface on the CD ROM drive and then write code to control that with a pair of microprocessors. That was quite some achievement.

Third was the design of the DAC. This project was contracted out to an engineering student from Auckland University, who had some track record with this sort of work. It went through two major variations. The first was a sonic disaster, the second with some guidance from me became the production DAC. I had to start from basics on this and learn a lot in order to provide this guidance. As I had no prior experience with DACs this outside help was critical to us. Fourth and last was the power supply and analogue circuitry design, which is my forte, and here I followed standard Plinius practice. Big power supply etc etc etc.

Was it important that the CD player hit a particular price point?

We set ourselves a target after consultation with our retailers and distributors both here and worldwide. In the event based on feedback we have had we may have been able to go higher, so I think of this as being real value for money.

One area that has caused a lot of comment among AudioEnz writers is the lack of controls and a display on the front panel of the CD-101. Why did Plinius choose to do this and what feedback from your distributors and customers have you had on this?

This has caused a few questions, and we have had to explain our philosophy. Once explained the response has always been "Oh yes! of course, that really makes sense" The idea for us was to honour the Plinius tradition. We make products that are intended to be used for music reproduction. We hope our customers are using our products for that purpose.

Consider the process of listening to a recording on vinyl… you walk to the turntable, put on the disc, lower the stylus into the groove, and sit down. From that point on you listen, and become absorbed in the music. We hope it becomes an involving emotional experience. We wanted our CD Player to be used the same way. Sit down and listen. Don't worry about whether you are 2 minutes and 35 seconds into a track, just focus on the music. We provided enough feedback in the display to support that sort of use. Similar to vinyl… "oh yeah… I'm about 2/3 the way through…" when glancing across to the player.

Think outside the square. We did not want to make another all singing all dancing piece of whizzy electronics. The market is full of that, and its not Plinius.

Are there more digital devices planned from Plinius?

Not at present. But if our customers want something, we'll look into it.

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