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 Post subject: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale [SOLD]
PostPosted: 18 Dec 2015, 22:49 
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I decided to sell my Pixel Magic Systems Crystalio II VPS-3800 Video processor. I want to initially list it here for lddb members. If there isn't an interest, I will move the add to eBay and other sites. It is in near brand new condition. I am the second owner. The first owner used it in a very high end custom home theater. It was professionally installed into a component rack to provide video to a $40,000 front projector. I bought it from the first owner a few years ago and used it with the best equipment such as Pioneer Pro-141FD plasma and HLD-X0 LD player. It was installed into a Salamander Design A/V cabinet and provided clean power from Panamax power conditioners with a dedicated line/breaker from the mains. I have the original manufacturer's box, manual, rack ears and remote controls.

You can access the PMS website here http://www.crystalio.com/ They still have a few units in stock but asking $5500.

Asking Price: $1500 + actual shipping(Worldwide) +%3 PayPal fees + lddb.com fee. lddb.com fee is $5+%1 above $200.

I will charge actual shipping and will not charge for packaging material. The item is already packaged and ready to ship, measurements are as followed below to calculate estimate on shipping. I am willing to ship worldwide. I am located in zipcode 01420 USA. Local pick up is available, I am willing to deliver it up to 60 miles at no charge.

Length: 24
Width: 23
Height: 15
Weight: 31lbs

I can provide you extensive support for setting it up and tweaking as I have extensive knowledge of the unit. Unit is up to date with the latest firmware. Feel free to contact me for any serious offers and questions.

(obsolete/unreachable picture remove)

VPS-3800 is the highest model and has a few benefits over the 3300.

-Upgraded clocks with 1ppm jitter. This benefits the analog to digital converters(ADC) which digitizes your composite video for processing.
-Built in media player with 200GB IDE HDD. You can rip your DVDs and play them through the media player with menus, subtitles, soundtracks.
-2x HD-SDI inputs. This is the purest input type, If you can locate a HD-SDI or SDI modded player, you can get the purest video to your CII to process.

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I will include the following with the Crystalio II

- 2x remote controls (originally comes with 1)
- 1x media remote to access all media player functions (originally not provided, paid $100 extra)
- Rack ears (originally not provided, $50 option)
- AudioQuest NRG-X3 3Ft(1m) power cord (Fully shielded, $100 value)
- AudioQuest Hawkeye composite cable with BNC connectors (Best composite cable you will find, $350 value)
- 6x AudioQuest BNC to RCA adaptors ($20 each x 6 =$120 value)
- Monster Cable composite cable and interconnects ($100 value)
- Monster Cable M-series HDMI cable 4Ft (1.2m) (10.2Gbps bandwidth heavily shielded, $160)

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As you can see all inputs/outputs are professional grade BNC type. I will include 6 BNC to RCA adaptors. I will also include an AudioQuest Hawkeye composite cable with both end BNC connectors (pictured above). This is a $350 cable, with very heavy shielding and DSS circuitry for best signal transition. Players like Pioneer HLD-X0 and LD-S2 has BNC type composite outputs, mated with this cable into Crystalio II will give you the best picture you can ever achieve from Laserdiscs.

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Packaging is already done and this unit is ready to ship. I obtained professional packaging material from the nearest computer shop. It is custom designed for shipping out large desktop computers. I use one of these boxes over the manufacturer's box. I also use additional bubble wraps both inside the manufacturer's box and outer box to ensure best transit. I took pictures during packaging the unit.

(obsolete/unreachable pictures remove)


Last edited by substance on 09 May 2017, 16:49, edited 3 times in total. _________________
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale
PostPosted: 18 Dec 2015, 23:13 
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VPS-3300 vs VPS-3800; below is a conversation where I explained the differences of these two models.

I have opened up both units and studied them. I have the pictures posted somewhere on this forum. 3800 has a few extra components. Most notably 3.5" 200GB IDE internal HDD and the small flash memory to run the built in Linux based media player. It can playback well known audio and video codecs but the list isn't like you would find on a roku. I copied some DVD images in .iso form, it treated them like actual DVDs with menus, subtitles, audio tracks, extras and all. Technically it would make it the best DVD player ever. No rotational motion like in DVDs, data comes from an image hence no jitter. Since everything is internal, there is no transfer loss as it would happen in DVI, HDMI, SDI (these require color space conversion as none can carry 4:2:0). Its pretty fast, no layer change pause. I didn't play with the other formats supported but it does HD up to a certain bitrate. You can also stream from a Windows PC but you need some additional software(free?). It also can access external hdds through its 2 usb ports in the back(I tried up to 2TB).

I don't know how familiar you are with electrical engineering. All microprocessors need an external clock to tell them when their cycle begins and ends. This clock is a pulse generator and sends voltage on and off in exactly same interval continuously. Each cycle, the processor makes calculations. Frequencies mentioned on computer CPUs are this clock frequencies (i.e intel i7 at 3.2ghz is 3.2 billion cycles per second), it has nothing to do with how much work a microprocessor can do as some processors can do more work per cycle then others. The consistency in the clock is very important. If the cycle intervals are irregular, the processor will skip that cycle(data loss). Digital to analog converters (DACs), ADC, TBC and such also need this clock, its better if they share the same clock so they don't have to re-clock the data. VPS-3800 has upgraded clocks that are 1ppm precise. This ensures the analog composite video is digitized and processed in the CII with near zero loss and better accuracy. If you use analog audio outputs of CII, they are also benefit from the better clocks. In other words, 3800 has audiophile grade analog section.

Another minor difference is 3800 model has HD-SDI inputs (2 of them) vs SD-SDI on 3300. If you can find a SDI modified DVD or Blu-ray player, you can use these inputs for the purest signal. SDI taps directly into the mpeg decoder and bypasses all internal circuitry in the DVD or BD player (or HD-DVD player). This was very popular a few years back before HDMI players with source direct such in OPPO. SDI also bypass copy protection circuitry so no handshakes or screen blanking. I will be honest, SDI modded players are rare. They show up time to time and they are cheap now but not many around. It was an expensive modification back then. The internal media player in the 3800 makes it unnecessary as it is even purer. No SDI for LD as it doesn't need an mpeg decoder.

You can connect all your devices to CII including BD and HD-DVD players. If you have AV gear that is capable of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA, you need a dual HDMI out player such as Sony BDP-S790. You can route the video to CII and audio to your AV amp. If you only rock, Dolby Digital, DTS and PCM, CII can pass these signals. You can even tweak lipsync. As I said CII has a zillion adjustments, you can select different audio inputs on the same video inputs. You can watch HD cable tv while sending audio from your CD player. This multi audio input per video input works perfectly for LD. I used 1 input for RF(AC-3), 1 input for Digital Coax (PCM and DTS) and another input (analog RCA) for analog audio from LD. CII grabs the audio and sends it via HDMI output to my AV amp along with the video. Needless to say no 3D video or anything beyond 1080p.

It has some contrast boost (like Darbee) and noise reduction. I never used these. I used an external dedicated noise enhancer for this. Algolith Mosquito HDMI. It uses a broadcast grade noise reduction algorithm which isn't beat yet. If you watch cable TV and you hate compression artifacts, these is the device. The youtube video was mine btw.
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale
PostPosted: 18 Dec 2015, 23:17 
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Crystalio II is well known among LD fans. It has one of the best 3D adaptive comb filters. I made this youtube video a while ago using Video Essentials (1996) [DVDI0712]. Here you can see its Snell Wilcox comb filter torture test results Crystalio II on Snell&Wilcox.

VPS-3800 internals is the link where you can find internal component pictures and information about this unit. It's comb filter is based on Texas Instruments TVP5160. De-interlacers are Gennum VXP GF9350 and Faroudja FLi2310.

It is a dual stream video processor where it can process two inputs at once and provide two separate video to its 2 hdmi outputs.

in this thread I talk about Crystalio II and its functions extensively.
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale
PostPosted: 20 Dec 2015, 04:37 
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Good morning Substance,

Thank you for advertising your item here first, as I for one really appreciate this, and thank you also for the pictures that you have kindly provided.

I would like to own this exquisite piece of hardware, but unfortunately one is unable to afford this right now.

Hope you get the asking price for this, as the right person will pay.......... I know I would!

Kind Regards

:thumbup: :wave:
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale
PostPosted: 20 Dec 2015, 21:47 
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Crystalio II VPS-3800 has been sold!
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale. SOLD!
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 06:59 
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Why did you sell it?
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale. SOLD!
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 08:42 
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I think he had duplicates, plus a Lumagen Radiance 2144. That's kind of overkill today. Very nice units anyway.
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale. SOLD!
PostPosted: 21 Dec 2015, 11:37 
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I had two Crystalio IIs, I sold both of them. I own a Lumagen Radiance 2144 and Radiance Pro 4449, I wasn't using the Crystalio IIs anymore. I will list several more items in the next few days such as a D-VHS deck, other video processors.
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale. SOLD!
PostPosted: 09 May 2017, 11:52 
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Pending sale got canceled. The unit is for sale again. Same details except I will use a similar but different second box. I am willing to hand deliver within 3 hours to 01545. I have it up on ld forever as well.
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale. SOLD!!!
PostPosted: 09 May 2017, 16:50 
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Unit sold!!!
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale. SOLD!!!
PostPosted: 09 May 2017, 17:23 
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I'm really amazed at how many people have the same color stone style counter top in their houses.
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale. SOLD!!!
PostPosted: 09 May 2017, 19:08 
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rein-o wrote:
I'm really amazed at how many people have the same color stone style counter top in their houses.


This was our previous place. It wasn't real stone:) I prefer white quartz.
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale. SOLD!!!
PostPosted: 09 May 2017, 19:17 
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substance wrote:
Unit sold!!!


So that went quick! I hope whoever purchased it will be happy with it. Seems like an awesome beast.

I think that same TI comb filter chip in the Crystalio is in one of the Oppo Blu-ray players that have an HDMI input. If only there was a way to translate composite to a pure 480i HDMI signal. Though I've heard the Oppo has aggressive scaling.
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 Post subject: Re: Crystalio II VPS-3800 for sale. SOLD!!!
PostPosted: 09 May 2017, 19:25 
Young Padawan
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sega3dmm wrote:
substance wrote:
Unit sold!!!


So that went quick! I hope whoever purchased it will be happy with it. Seems like an awesome beast.

I think that same TI comb filter chip in the Crystalio is in one of the Oppo Blu-ray players that have an HDMI input. If only there was a way to translate composite to a pure 480i HDMI signal. Though I've heard the Oppo has aggressive scaling.


Oppo doesnt have any analog video inputs therefor no comb filter chip. Everything(in software) happens inside the mediatek mpeg decoder chip in oppo.


Yes it was a super fast sale. First time it was listed a year ago, it got sold in hours. This time it took only 3 hours. It seems the demand is still high.
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