One of hi-fi's golden rules, proved a million times over by the rare-as-dodo exceptions, is that what seduces the ears and fires the spirit then offends the eyes. This maxim is understandable when budget constraints dictate that styling may never move beyond six flat sides and a choice of Henry-Ford colours. But when costs rise towards the pain barrier, it's less forgivable. Unfortunately, large price tags often accompany boxes with all the design flair of an industrial waste disposal unit. While Sonic Frontiers' £7000 Processor 3 might sit to the wrong side of the fence, the Transport 3 is emphatically in the right.

Seen front-on, only the gentle bulge in the transport's top-plate indicates that there might be something beyond the norm going on here. Gaze down from above and press the Open/Close button, and you'll soon know what that something is. The Transport 3 has one of the most 'addictive' loading systems I've come across. Spending five minutes hitting Open/Close on a CD mechanism is a very sad admission to make, but when you see this SF in the flesh, you will understand - the pictures don't do it justice. When the curved 'petals' of the Iris slide apart camera-aperture style, you can't help but smile. And the round remote is a tasty touch too.

As you'd guess from this transport's weight, there's rather more to it than a fancy disc cover. Where most player's mechanisms are sprung to isolate them from vibration, the Sonic's is bolted straight to the top-plate. This makes sense since said plate is an inch-thick slab of machined aluminum and the base perches on four soft feet.

Sonic Frontiers' brochures tend to feature lines like, "more than 12 reguIated power supply stages", and thus it is with the Transport 3, where these are fed from multiple potted transformers.

HIP TO BE SQUARE
Soldered to the thick, heavily-plated PCBs alongside all the above goodies is a circuit you won't find on many other transports. It connects the Transport 3 to the Processor 3, but it isn't the TosLink, AES/EBU or S/PDIF you'll see everywhere else. I²S is the moniker that could soon be ringing in the ears of many digital audiophiles of the two-box persuasion.



Many single-boxers already possess 1²S inside their black boxes, for the 'Inter-IC Sound' bus as it is otherwise known transmits the digits from a player's transport to its DAC. Sending data down a cable to an external convertor has, until now, been handled predominantly by Sony/Philips' Digital Interface Format (S/PDIF).

S/PDIF isn't perfect. It crams the digital signal, the bit clock (which lets the DAC know when each of the CD's 16 individual bits arrives) and the word clock (which tells the DAC when alI 16 are in) onto a single conductor betwixt mech and DAC. These parts are therefore encoded together, transmitted, received and decoded, all of which introduces jitter.

SF's '1²S*enhanced' goes about things rather differently. Using a military-spec 13W3 cable (the normal-grade version of which you'll see connecting computers to their monitors), it sends each set of signals down their own separate conductors (five twisted, shielded pairs and two co-axial cables). According to SF, this reduces jitter from around the I00 picoseconds of many capable digital front-ends to immeasurably low levels. And as we found when we swapped digital interconnects, you can hear the improvements very easily.

Once the data stream reaches the Processor 3, it encounters two dual, custom-made UltraAnalog DACs working in balanced mode. These sit on a PCB made of ARLON, a Teflon hybrid material. To keep noise and pollution out of the Processor's circuitry, SF have resorted to a hefty outboard PSU. The mains transformer is potted, like those in the Transport, and in the various regulators you'll find a sprinkling of the DlYer's friend, Sanyo's Os-Con capacitors.

Taking further the idea of teasing apart the strands which make up a DAC, the current-to-voltage convertor, which is often on the IC as the DAC itself, occupies its own board space and is hewn from discrete components. The tubes which SF are so fond of appear in the output stage, where four of the company's beloved 6922s are split between left and right channels, pairs paralleled up to lower output impedance. And don't forget the PMD-1 00 filter from Pacific Microsonics, whose HDCD initials can be found on a growing number of CDs.

FEAR THE REAPER?
One sure way to wobble the knees and wallets of someone who's invested the price of a new car in their DAC and transport is to whisper the words, "new format". However, Sonic have produced this duo more as an exercise in squeezing the very best from CD than as all-singing, all-playing multi-format machinery which lags in sound quality. That said, the Processor 3 has board space available for use after the dust has settled on what looks like it might be the duel between DVD Audio and Super Audio CD. DVD as a video and audio format will be handled by SF DVD players specifically designed to deal with that format.



BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER
The Transport and Processor 3 were left running over the course of a week before the listening began. Partnering equipment included Teac's P-30 transport, a range of standard digital interconnects (including Kimber and XLO), the Assemblage L-1 pre-amp and jamo's Concert 8s bi-amped with Musical Fidelity's X-A200 monoblocs.

The law of cliches states that, with components this much more expensive than our customary sources, there should be much more of everything to be heard, and so it was. The bottom-end welly went down a treat with the drummer on Eric Bibb and Needed Times' eponymous album - he was smacking away on his kit with a raw, rhythmic energy which put the bump and grind back into 'Nothing Like You Used To'. The musical intent might have been hot and sweaty, but there was no lack of control to the SFs' output - imaging was pin-sharp, vocals smoother than a teflon-coated car salesman and sound staging spacious enough to bump up against the walls of our listening room.

From the same CD, 'Saucer And Cup', with its vocals and guitar, upped the ambient stakes. A lot of players seem to be able to put together a realistic acoustic only when there's a fair amount of instrumental action going on, and then fall down on sparser numbers by reproducing lone images without the overall ambience which binds them into place. The Canadians did rather better here, with a holistic presentation which pulled all the strands together into a spatially and emotionally satisfying whole.

The Chemical Brothers' 'Setting Sun' is always a tough test of CD replay. This disc's production is hard, harsh, bright and very untidy. If a player has sufficient smoothness to make the track listenable, then its sheer funk usually suffers. Switch priorities and you have a boogy factor extreme allied to treble which will crack glass an inch thick. Spinning on the Philips CDM-12i under its petite magnetic puck, this single boomed out of the jamos without causing a medical alert. The plunging bass beats and hacksaw midrange weren't shaking, rattling and rolling - pile driving, focused and powerful were more apt descriptions. Still, there was a sneaking feeling that there was just a hint, an iota of involvement missing. A change of cable beckoned.



Out went the assorted RCA, BNC and AES/EBU interconnects to be replaced by the new I2S*enhanced. Even fresh out of the bag, this link was far superior to its predecessors, and the gap grew as it burned in. The claimed drop in jitter manifested itself as a much more natural, flowing and expressive delivery. Stravinsky's Firebird metamorphosed into a more menacing, forceful composition on a larger scale as tiny dynamic contrasts stepped out of hiding. Timpani put on weight in the best possible sense of the words, too.

The most telling gauge of a change in sound quality is when you remove an upgrade, not when you first connect it up. After a day of I²S*enhanced, returning to run-of-the-mill cabling was a real disappointment - sound staging shrank back towards the 'speakers, music lost pace and energy and muddle set in. At least the normal cabling gave me a chance to wheel in Teac's f2500 P-30 to put the Transport 3 into perspective.

Now, given the more than minor price differential, you'd expect a pretty large gap in performance. The P-30 is very capable for the money though, so I was surprised by how thin, wiry and small it sounded by comparison. Orchestral climaxes were veiled and difficult to follow, and when the elbow grease was applied in Rock, the midrange coarsened. But for alI its extra investment, for some reason the Sonic Frontiers wasn't quite as toe-tapping on the leather-clad lunchbox Rock of Led Zeppelin as the Teac (although reverting to I2S*enhanced set the balance right).

TO BOLDLY GO. . .
With the new DAC to transport link, SF's Transport and Processor 3 make a seriously tempting proposition, if you can afford to play fantasy hi-fi and put your money where your dreams are. Working as a pair, they produce fluid, open and very natural results a long way from the hard, flat and uninvolving noise CD has often been accused of. Add to that the very classy looks of the transport, its gorgeous engineering and the upgradeability of the DAC, and the sense of spending lots of money once on a source to last I0 years instead of buying cheap every two or three years is obvious