Kenwood DM-7090 (c. 1996)
The DM-7090 is a MiniDisc recorder that Kenwood released around 1996 as a refined follow-up to the DM-7080. It was priced at ¥78,000 in Japan and around £500 in the UK, where it was reviewed head-to-head against the Sony MDS-JE500. The review's verdict: the Kenwood sounded very good, but it cost more and wasn't quite as intuitive to operate as the Sony.
The headline feature is the 20-bit REC D.R.I.V.E. system, an evolution of Kenwood's Dynamic Resolution Intensive Vector Enhancement processing adapted for recording. It uses digital filters to smooth the sound and enhance low-level detail. It works on both playback and recording, so analog sources could be captured and replayed at 20-bit resolution. The deck also has a sampling rate converter that handles 44.1/32/48kHz sources (from BS, CS, or DAT, for example) and converts them to 44.1kHz for digital recording via the SCSM method. The A/D converter is a 1-bit, 5th-order delta-sigma design with 18-bit resolution. The recorder uses the newer ATRAC compression, with revised bit allocation and improved floating-point calculation at low signal levels.
What Hi Fi? (1996) praised the sound, noting well-extended, tuneful bass, good presence in the midband, and clean, crisp treble — and singled out the coaxial digital input as the best way to feed it, saying the optical input sounded "just a bit softer." The review also gave it four stars for sound and verdict, and five for build and facilities. The same review noted that in practice the menu-driven editing worked well enough, but the sheer number of buttons on the front panel made operation less intuitive than the Sony's.
The feature list is generous for the period: quick erase, quick move and track move for reordering songs, track divide and combine, an edit cancel function to undo mistakes, title search, a multi-jog dial for title entry, a 3-mode level meter, and a large 12-character dot-matrix fluorescent display that supports katakana. It also supports monaural long-time recording.
Known specs:
- 1-bit D/A converter, 8fs oversampling (352.8kHz)
- Frequency response: 8Hz–20kHz (EIAJ)
- S/N ratio: 105dB or more (EIAJ)
- Dynamic range: 92dB or more (EIAJ)
- THD: 0.007% or less (1kHz, EIAJ)
- Wow and flutter: below measurement limit (±0.001% W PEAK, EIAJ)
- Line input: 500mV/22kΩ; fixed output: 2.0V/600Ω; headphone: 20mW/32Ω
- Digital in/out: coaxial 0.5Vp-p/75Ω and optical
- Power consumption: 18W
- Dimensions: 440 × 94 × 373mm (W×H×D); weight: 5.2kg
No current market prices, common failure points, or parts availability are documented. The record relies heavily on a single Japanese database source plus that one UK comparison review. If you own one and know how it's aged, the archive would welcome the input.
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