Sony TA-E9000ES
A 28-pound A/V preamp that packed three 32-bit DSP engines and a touchscreen remote — and cost $1,700 when Dolby Digital was still new.
Overview
The first thing that hits you about the TA-E9000ES is the weight: 28.2 pounds (12.8 kg) for a preamplifier, a component class where a lot of competitors ship half that. The second thing is the front panel's row of logos — Dolby Digital, DTS, MPEG Multichannel — which is about as direct a statement of intent as Sony ever printed on a faceplate. This was the flagship ES-series surround preamp of its moment, and it was priced accordingly at $1,700.
What sat behind that deceptively simple front panel was the real story. Sony built the TA-E9000ES around a 32-bit floating-point DSP — the company claimed it was the first such chip in a home high-fidelity component — and backed it with a pair of 32-bit fixed-point DSPs handling the enhancement and ambience work. That's three separate 32-bit engines, and the processing budget shows in how much the preamp lets you adjust. Audio (March 1999, p.49) called it "arguably in a class by itself," and the measurement staff there were plainly impressed by the DSP horsepower on tap.
The connectivity is where the 9000 earns its keep for anyone assembling a period home theater. It carries analog inputs for a moving-magnet phono cartridge, a tuner, a CD player, and two recorders (labeled "MD/DAT" and "Tape"), plus A/V inputs for three sources and inputs and outputs for three video recorders. On the digital side there are inputs for four sources and a digital output for the MD/DAT recorder — though that output only passes digital sources, since signals the preamp digitizes from analog aren't fed to it. All digital inputs are Toslink optical, with the CD and DVD inputs adding S/PDIF coaxial jacks and the laserdisc input carrying coaxial jacks for both S/PDIF and AC-3 RF. The CD, DVD, and LD coaxial connectors and the DVD Toslink input handle sampling rates from 32 to 96 kHz and word lengths up to 24 bits; the remaining optical inputs don't go that far.
Around back there's also an internal AC-3 RF demodulator, a video processor loop that sits ahead of the recording outputs (so a titler or composite-to-S-video converter's work can be recorded as well as displayed), outputs for two powered subwoofers and two center-channel amps, and outputs for two video monitors. Every composite-video jack is doubled with an S-video connector. What's missing is a component-video bus — a gap Audio (March 1999, p.49) flagged bluntly, arguing the omission followed the industry's pattern rather than leading it the way a component of this stature should have. All the jacks are gold-plated.
The volume control is one of the more unusual engineering choices in the unit. Sony's "Digital i" circuit combines digital and analog techniques: after dejittering, eight-times oversampling, and feedforward digital filtering, each channel's data becomes a 1-bit pulse stream feeding an independent Current Pulse DAC, and volume is adjusted by changing the current sources feeding those converters rather than by recalculating word values. The theory is digital-control tracking with analog resolution at low levels, and Audio (March 1999, p.49) came away impressed with the line stage — input impedance higher than typical without hurting noise, and an adequate safety margin before A/D converter overload. The one blemish: a 0.2-dB output-level mismatch between channels traced to A/D converter gain, with no way to correct it.
Speaker setup goes well past the usual large/small switch. Crossover frequencies are settable in 10-Hz steps from 40 to 200 Hz — 80 Hz is the default — with 6-dB/octave high-pass and 12-dB/octave low-pass slopes. Audio (March 1999, p.49) noted those slopes are only half as steep as Lucasfilm requires for Home THX components, though the 9000 does meet Dolby Labs' bass-redirection requirements and fulfills them fully. Channel levels adjust in 0.5-dB steps across a +10 to -20 dB range (then Off) for center and surrounds, and 0 to -20 dB for the sub. The tone controls are genuinely excessive in the best sense: independent sets for main, center, and surround channels, each with shelving bass and treble adjustable ±10 dB in 0.5-dB steps, bass turnover from 99 Hz to 1 kHz in 21 steps, treble turnover from 1 to 10 kHz in 23 steps, plus a parametric midrange with three bandwidths, a center frequency adjustable in 37 steps from 198 Hz to 10 kHz, and ±10 dB of range. Five memories store favorite settings, and settings are held individually per sound field.
The DSP modes run deep: 17 cinema modes beyond straight decoding, nine music environments (Small Hall, Large Hall, Opera House, Jazz Club, Disco/Club, Church, Live House, Arena, Stadium), and one for video games. About half the modes let you tweak wall reflectivity and reverberation. Virtual surround can simulate more speakers than you own, which matters if the room won't accommodate a full array.
Measured performance held up. Line response was flat enough that filter ripple was essentially invisible even on a very sensitive scale, and phono RIAA equalization was accurate from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. The antialiasing filters limit treble response to 23 kHz. The preamp can deliver 9.4 volts — more than any power amp needs — and at a realistic 2-volt operating level THD + N stayed below 0.016% across the audio band. In Dolby Pro Logic mode the response curves were about as clean as they come, with surround channels correctly limited to 7 kHz. One caveat surfaced in testing: a first sample lost output at -90 dBFS on dithered digital input, though a second sample showed no such problem and measured among the most linear converters the reviewer had tested — a discrepancy Audio (March 1999, p.49) suspected might be software rather than hardware.
The remote deserves its own paragraph. It's a touchscreen unit with two-way communication, so its memory can refresh when sources change, and with certain Sony CD players it can display disc and song titles. It's easy to operate once you can see it — but the backlighting and screen contrast drew criticism, and the thing eats batteries. There's also an RS-232C port and an "Analizer/MIC In" mini-jack on the back, both labeled for future upgrades, and Sony was publicly tight-lipped about what those upgrades might be. An 8-megabyte flash memory bank sits behind the DSPs, feeding speculation that new instruction sets could be downloaded rather than installed by a technician.
Collectors chasing one today should expect the usual aging-electronics caveats and verify function carefully, particularly the touchscreen remote, which is central to operating the unit and difficult to replace. The TA-E9000ES is a snapshot of the moment surround processing moved from outboard boxes into the preamp chassis — heavy, overbuilt, and full of capability most owners never fully explored.
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