The Philips SACD10-PE Engineering Sample is a precursor to the Philips SACD1000. All Philips SACD10-PE Engineering Sample were composed of existing DVD player parts, such as the power supply and housing. However, the analogue part is pure Marantz. The SACD10-PE contains the first version of the Furore chip.
The Furore chip was the bottleneck. Philips did not have enough budget at the time to produce a good chip. In addition, there were also internal problems at Philips at the time. All versions of the Furore chip were not well designed in terms of heat management. The Philips SACD1000 has an mk2 version of the Furore chip. Unfortunately, the problems with the mk2 chip had not been fixed.
Andrew Demery:
The 'Furore' chip -- what a disaster that was. I can remember being in a Philips meeting and Piet Welles was excitedly telling us about it and why they named it 'Furore'.
Despite having several British team members, no one had thought to ask us about the name. Now my Dutch was not brilliant, and is virtually nil after 20 years in the US, but it seems like the team behind the chip had focused on the 'excitement' part of its definition, and had failed to understand that 'furore' is nearly always used in the sense of an uproar or commotion. It seldom has a positive meaning (The Government's raising of taxes caused a public furore.) Just like it is rare to use the word 'gay' these days to mean 'cheerful'. I pointed this out in the meeting, but they chose to ignore me, and then the chips did cause a furore because all the players which used it died.
