Digital Trends

Pioneer Elite X-Z9

July 7th, 2008 | by Matt Aalto

SACD Testing

After some time with the iPod it was time to explore the SACD quality of the X-Z9, needless to say, we were dually impressed. As of February 2008, there were only around 5000 SACD’s available for purchase, so the titles are few and are heavily influenced by jazz or classical music. We did locate a Norah Jones Hybrid SACD of Come away with me and Kind of Blue by John Coltrane and Miles Davis. The music was clearly at another level and to put it simply, sounds more pure. The untrained ear can hear a difference and the experience of listening to music begins all over again. The only way we can really describe the effect is to slightly cover your ears and that’s CD, take your hands away and that’s SACD. If you haven’t heard a SACD before, and you’re really into music, you owe it to yourself to listen to one.

Home Media and Networking Test

We tested the system via connection to the DLNA compliant Ethernet connection and the experience was similar to the iPod connection - easy to operate, and the music sounded great. The system does a good job of managing the audio source and allowing easy integration. The screen on the X-Z9 is nice, but there are some delays when waiting for longer titles to scroll across, making instant gratification somewhat delayed. When the screen is being used, it goes black and just the words are lit up, and while in stand by mode, it switches to the opposite where the background is lit up and the letters are black. The latter was much easier to read and we would have preferred Pioneer giving the option to choose which display you prefer. You can however dim the display, turn it completely off or disable the reversing of the display altogether.

Other features in the Home Media Gallery include the Sirius and XM radio inputs. The X-Z9 does not have the satellite radio’s built in, but is considered “ready” by only needing a tuner (with subscription) to plug in to the X-Z9. The USB interface is a great idea and we’re glad Pioneer included it, you can simply plug a thumb drive into the system and play your music that way. Playable codecs include MP3, LPCM, WAV, WMA, AAC and Flac. There are several ways to adjust the sound manually on the X-Z9 including switching sound modes to presets including Vivid, Exciting and Relaxing for whatever genre of music you’re listening to. There are also more basic treble and bass up or down controls. To add even more bass to your music, you can select the Loudness button. In most cases when selecting Loudness, you invite background hissing or static noise. Some of this was prevalent in our tests and unless absolutely required, we preferred to keep it off. Also available to fine tuning your music is the Sound Retriever. The purpose of the Sound Retriever is to help replace the data lost in audio during the WMA, MP3 or MPEG-4 compression process. During the compression process sound depletes and leaves uneven sound images. The Sound Retriever uses technology that brings back some of that lost quality. Each playback function on the system can have sound retriever on or off, and those settings are automatically saved for future use.

Conclusion

The Pioneer Elite X-Z9 is a solid system with few quirks that make it enjoyable for those that are just into their music and want a system capable of great sound and lots of features. The quality of the sound, combined with the functionality and overall design make this a good investment choice for an all in one audiophile solution. Priced at around $1800.00US, it’s a great deal compared to the cost of building an independent system piece by piece.

Pros:

• Excellent Sound
• Lots on interface options
• Design

Cons:

• Bulky remote
• Display options
• No FF/RW on iPod