Studer A727

A pro CD player with AES/EBU outputs, balanced XLR, and a BNC clock loop - the machine that put Studer's name on the front of a Philips deck.

Overview

The A727 is a professional compact disc player. It was the first product to come out of the Studer/Philips joint venture. The transport is a die-cast disc mechanism on damped isolation mounts, the circuit boards are modular, and there's an integral rackmount flange, so the deck sits on a tabletop or bolts into a rack without a separate kit. It was built for a control room or a production facility, not a living room shelf.

The conversion side is where the A727 earns its keep. It uses new LSI chips running full 16-bit resolution, with dual D/A converters and adaptive error correction. The period documentation positioned this as serious digital engineering, not a repackaged consumer board. For specialized production work the machine also carries digital outputs for audio and for CD-I/CD-ROM data. That only makes sense if you're feeding a disc into a larger system rather than just listening to it.

The systems role is the real story. The A727 offers multiple cuing modes and an autocue mode, a self-illuminated display panel, AES/EBU outputs, balanced XLR outputs, and BNC clock input and output jacks for varispeed and synchronized operation. The intent is plain: lock it to house clock, cue it instantly and precisely, and hand off digital audio to the rest of a facility over balanced lines. The revised front panel carries a 6- by 2-inch numerical keypad, so operators could punch in track and index numbers directly.

A lone A727 is only half the picture. Studer built the A729 CD system controller to drive up to four A727 and/or A730 players in any combination, with control handled through the machines' ES interfaces. The A729 can recognize up to 100 discs and store up to three start and end cue points per disc. It can also hold an automatic program of up to three sequences in the editing module's central memory for each connected player. In a maximum four-player configuration that works out to as many as twelve preprogrammed sequences with automatic switching. There's also the C270 autolocator/channel remote, described as a universal remote for all units in the C270 Series.

The names trip people up. The A728 Controller, listed at $1,300, can operate up to three A727 players and provides three sets of status indicators, each allowing simultaneous display of track and time functions alongside three sets of start/stop controls (Sound and Communication, February 1992, p.36). The A729 is the larger four-player unit. Collectors chasing a "complete" A727 setup are often really chasing one of these controllers, and the two are frequently confused in listings.

Based on the available documentation, the A727 has no deep published bench-test record in the consumer press. The professional lineage and the joint-venture origin are well attested, but anyone expecting a thick file of independent lab measurements should temper that expectation. What's documented is the feature set and the system architecture.