Toshiba SD-3006
The matte-gray first salvo from the company that helped invent DVD - a $699 player that nailed the video and left the audio conversion to somebody else.
Overview
Run a finger along the SD-3006's top and you feel an embossed surface, not the flat stamped steel of a commodity player. The transport buttons are elongated teardrops, arranged in pairs to the right of the disc tray and display. The power teardrop stands alone at the far left. The finish is a matte gray that reads as a deliberate rebuke to the black boxes surrounding it. Collectors who've handled one tend to remember the sculpted front panel before they remember anything about the specs.
The SD-3006 was the company's claim on that territory, launched as its premiere DVD player. The same review notes Toshiba had worked alongside Time Warner to envision DVD largely as it ultimately shipped, and credits the company as the technological brains of that partnership. This is the player that carried that engineering reputation into a dealer's showroom.
The back panel tells you how Toshiba thought the machine should be used. Two pairs of gold-plated RCA jacks handle left and right analog output. A separate RCA jack carries a "PCM/AC-3 Digital" signal to feed an external D/A converter or Dolby Digital decoder. Composite video gets its own RCA, the Y/Cr/Cb component signals get three more, and there's a multipin S-video jack as well. A slide switch above the component jacks selects composite or component output. A second switch near the digital audio jack is marked "AC-3 (Analog Off)" and "PCM (Analog On)". You flip it to AC-3 when an outboard Dolby Digital decoder is downstream, and to PCM when the next device can't parse an AC-3 bitstream. That switch sums up the design philosophy. The heavy lifting of surround decoding belongs in the preamp or receiver, not duplicated inside every source component.
In practice, play a 5.1-channel Dolby Digital DVD through the analog outputs and you get a matrixed mixdown of the original AC-3 recording, compatible with Dolby Pro Logic decoders. Owners who wanted true 5.1 had to feed the digital output into an external decoder. The analog mixdown is not a substitute. The review noted that stereo surround and the LFE channel's heavy bass don't survive the trip through the analog path, though listeners who'd never heard 5.1-channel Dolby Digital would likely find the Pro Logic mixdown impressive.
The video side is where the SD-3006 earned its keep. Luminance level showed no measurable error, gray-scale linearity was perfect on both staircase and sweep recordings, and chroma phase accuracy stayed within 2°. Chroma level ran high at +2.3 dB, but any decent monitor compensates. On still pictures the response extended beyond 4.2 MHz, holding solid to the topmost 5.75-MHz band on the Snell & Wilcox test pattern. The reviewer's verdict on video performance overall was simply "excellent."
The audio conversion is the caveat. The internal D/A converters are a low-bit, noise-shaping type, and the measurements were a mixed bag. Output level sat exactly on the standard 2 V at 0 dBFS, with channel balance within ±0.05 dB and a well-chosen 330-ohm line output impedance. Frequency response came in at 20 Hz to 20 kHz, +0.05, -0.32 dB, with about 0.25 dB of high-end droop and visible filter ripple. Signal-to-noise measured 97.3 dB A-weighted but only 88.2 dB CCIR-weighted. Dynamic range came in at 92.8 dB unweighted, 96.4 dB A-weighted, 86.7 dB CCIR-weighted. Channel separation exceeded 87.5 dB from 125 Hz to 16 kHz. Distortion was the weak spot. THD + N at 1 kHz dropped below -86.8 dBFS from 0 to -90 dBFS and below -93.1 dBFS from -30 to -90 dBFS, but the curve showed a sharp notch at 1 kHz and considerable aliasing above 10 kHz. On movie soundtracks the converter flaws went largely unnoticed. On music CDs the sound was noticeably less detailed and less transparent through the analog outputs than through an outboard decoder.
One limitation for anyone buying today: the SD-3006 does not recognize home-recorded CD-Rs. As Audio (July 1997, p.57) pointed out, that was true of any DVD player of the period that didn't use separate lasers for DVD and CD playback. It's a design-era constraint rather than a Toshiba failing, but a burned compilation disc will simply not play.
The remote has 38 buttons and four pads, preprogrammed to command TVs, cable boxes, and VCRs as well as the player itself, with a four-position slide switch to pick the device and per-position code entry for other manufacturers. The numeric keypad, programming buttons, and slow-motion controls hide behind a sliding panel at the base. You slide it completely off to change batteries. Slow motion runs at half, one-eighth, or one-sixteenth speed depending on how many times you press. An unusual "Last Play" function resumes DVD playback from slightly before the point where the player was previously stopped, though it only works if the player was left on in the interim with the disc still loaded. Transport scanning taps to double speed, then to eight-times-normal on a second tap. Three buttons above the transport controls, used with the four-way pad and Return/Enter, select camera angle, subtitle, and soundtrack language on discs that support them. A parental control system locks out playback by MPAA rating, and the numeric pad enters child lock-out codes.
On the front panel, the display above the rounded, protruding disc tray shows a two-digit title number, a three-digit chapter or track indicator, and a five-digit time readout (elapsed, total, or remaining). It also has status indicators for operating mode, disc type, memory/random/repeat modes, A-B repeat points, and, when a DVD is loaded, whether it carries multiple camera angles. HiFi-Stereo (July 1997, p.36) judged the SD-3006 better equipped for disc-navigating features than the other DVD players it had seen at the time.
In use, the player performed flawlessly across the reviewer's library. Still-frame, slow-motion, and high-speed scanning were smooth and solid, among the best the reviewer had seen from DVD. The picture struck him as perhaps a tad softer than other players, though he couldn't confirm without them on hand for comparison. The video aliasing seen on the bench showed up on a TV only as a beat pattern in densely packed lines, never in an actual movie. The Dolby test disc's "difficult bitstreams" all cleared through to the analog output, and the bitstream fed to an external decoder was solid enough that the decoder had no trouble either. The 5.1-to-Dolby-Surround downmixing measured right on using the Dolby disc's test signals. The one behavioral quirk showed up on the uncorrected-data-error chapters. The player never ceased decoding, meeting Dolby's stated requirement, but it did mute on a regular or irregular basis depending on the test, and on some chapters interrupted the sound with machine-gun rapidity.
Dimensions are 16% inches wide, 3¼ inches high, and 12⅛ inches deep (43 × 8.3 × 30.8 cm), at 8.9 pounds (4 kg). Original price was $699. For a collector, the calculus is straightforward: the video performance and the build are the reasons to own one, the internal DACs are the reason to feed it into something better, and the CD-R blindness is the reason to keep a CD-only machine around. It's a first-generation DVD player from the company that did the most to make the format exist — and it behaves exactly like one, in both the good ways and the compromised ones.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.