Old CD's on New Hardware

[qec]

I'm trying to decide about keeping my old CD collection. I have about 200 CD's mostly from the 1990's and early 2000's. If I drive digital out of an older CD player (good in it's day) into a new, highly regarded DAC am I likely to see any improvement in sound? I have good hardware in the rest of the system. I listen to hi res streaming mostly with occasional records (not for the "sound" quality but because I like the whole experience).
Thanks in advance

One thing to note is most of these CD's were good recordings back in their day. A lot of classical.

 

[Slayer]

I'm trying to decide about keeping my old CD collection. I have about 200 CD's mostly from the 1990's and early 2000's. If I drive digital out of an older CD player (good in it's day) into a new, highly regarded DAC am I likely to see any improvement in sound? I have good hardware in the rest of the system. I listen to hi res streaming mostly with occasional records (not for the "sound" quality but because I like the whole experience).
Thanks in advance

One thing to note is most of these CD's were good recordings back in their day. A lot of classical.

If you have a new dac with sota specs, it should provide better sound quality than your old cd players internal dac provides.

 

[DVDdoug]

am I likely to see any improvement in sound?

Probably not. If you are hearing noise from the older unit the new one might be quieter. Distortion and frequency response are generally very-good (often better than human hearing) so it's unlikely that you'll hear a difference.

And if you do an A/B (or ABX) listening test make sure to match the volumes. (Our brains tend to judge the louder one as "better" in various-mysterious ways.)

 

[somebodyelse]

If you do a sighted test you will probably think you hear a difference, for better or worse, whether or not it's really audible. The usual insistence on level matched blind testing here is to avoid the known ways the mind plays tricks on us, and find out if we can really hear a difference. Without knowing more about the CD player the best we can say about a real audible difference is 'maybe' - there have certainly been measurable improvements over the years, but whether they're audible will depend on how good the CD player, and the rest of the system is. Reviews of older kit aren't obvious in the review index, but the DAC1-USB and Denon DA-500 reviews should give you some idea when compared to high performance, low cost DACs like the E30, Modi 3+ etc. The audibility thresholds thread may give you some indication of how audible this might be, or you could use DISTORT to get some idea of what levels of what sorts of distortion you can distinguish.

 

[julian_hughes]

It depends a little on what your older CD player might be. The first generation players were effectively 14-bit and had very rolled off treble. However, that is mid 1980s, and anything made from the 1990s onward with a coaxial or optical output is likely to sound identical to any modern player connected to the same playback system. If you're using the CD players' analog outputs then there *may* be audible differences but if the players are any good at all then there shouldn't be. I suspect that the only real difference might be in the quality of the hardware error correction. Older CD players invariably did error correction but some modern players are actually built around PC CD-ROM drives which do not have this capability and so may handle dirty or damaged discs less well.

 

[Timcognito]

Rip the CD's to a SSD NAS and then donate the discs to a library. A good DAC will make them sound good.

 

[gene_stl]

Very unlikely you will discern an audible difference.

 

[Wes]

can't say as we don't know what DAC is in what CD player

 

[MarkS]

It depends a little on what your older CD player might be. The first generation players were effectively 14-bit and had very rolled off treble.

They most certainly did not have a rolled-off treble. Here is the frequency response of the original Sony CDP-101 player, from the January 1983 issue of Audio:

Here is the PDF of the complete issue:
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Audio/Archive-Audio/80s/Audio-1983-01.pdf

 

[julian_hughes]

My 1984 Marantz CD-54 had notably, unambiguously, obviously rolled off treble. Clearly I should have bought the Sony.

 

[MarkS]

Measurements of the Marantz CD-54 show 0.3dB ripples, but no treble roll-off:

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archi...iFI-Stereo/80s/HiFi-Stereo-Review-1984-09.pdf

FWIW, I had its predecessor, the top-loading Magnavox FD1000SL, and it sounded fantastic to me.

 

[julian_hughes]

I can't remember exactly what CD players & DACs I had subsequently (AMD? Was that an audio brand?), but when in 2000 I bought a Sony recording MiniDisc player which let its digital inputs work as a DAC I was amazed at how much better the DAC in the Sony was compared to my old CD players and dedicated DAC.

 

[julian_hughes]

Measurements of the Marantz CD-54 show 0.3dB ripples, but no treble roll-off:

View attachment 149129

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archi...iFI-Stereo/80s/HiFi-Stereo-Review-1984-09.pdf

FWIW, I had its predecessor, the top-loading Magnavox FD1000SL, and it sounded fantastic to me.

It sounded warm and rolled off to me. The above is not a flat response btw. Remember It wasn't even 16-bit, it could not accurately render the content of a CD!

 

[AnalogSteph]

My 1984 Marantz CD-54 had notably, unambiguously, obviously rolled off treble. Clearly I should have bought the Sony.

Circuitry in this one is essentially identical to the older CD-73, which measures like this. To nobody's surprise, frequency response is basically identical to the better-quality measurement @MarkS dug up, about 0.3 dBp-p worth of digital filter ripple (it is a 4X oversampling job) but that's that. Deemphasis also uses a relay, so unless that circuit were malfunctioning I can't see where a substantial treble rolloff would be coming from.

 

[julian_hughes]

I apologise for existing for over 5 decades and having clear recollection and not really wanting to join in a comparison of things which are not the things we are talking about but might be a bit like them. Will this do? Can I go now?

 

[Leporello]

It depends a little on what your older CD player might be. The first generation players were effectively 14-bit and had very rolled off treble.

This is not true at all.

As it happens just a week or two ago I realized I had read too many stories about the alleged shortcomings of "early digital". So I switched on my Philips CD104 (a 14 bit machine with oversampling; by the looks of it the Marantz is built on the same chassis) from 1984, connected it to a headphone amp and played a few 1980s discs, listening with HD600 headphones. To all intents and purposes the sound was identical to how the same discs sound through my Benchmark DAC today. Old myths refuse to die, I see.

 

[MarkS]

I apologise for existing for over 5 decades and having clear recollection and not really wanting to join in a comparison of things which are not the things we are talking about but might be a bit like them. Will this do? Can I go now?

*sigh*

You wrote "The first generation players were effectively 14-bit and had very rolled off treble." Measurements show that this is not correct.

I apologize for existing for over 6 decades and caring about facts.

 

[julian_hughes]

Even if you write "*sigh*" it doesn't make you right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio

"There was a long debate over the use of 16-bit (Sony) or 14-bit (Philips) quantization, and 44,056 or 44,100 samples/s (Sony) or approximately 44,000 samples/s (Philips). When the Sony/Philips task force designed the Compact Disc, Philips had already developed a 14-bit D/A converter (DAC), but Sony insisted on 16-bit. In the end Sony won, so 16 bits and 44.1 kilosamples per second prevailed. Philips found a way to produce 16-bit quality using its 14-bit DAC by using four times oversampling.[18]"

https://www.philips.com/a-w/research/technologies/cd/technology.html

"Oversampling

With the use of oversampling technology - which allowed the 16-bit Red Book standard to be met with the 14 bit digital-to-analogue converters that were available when the system was introduced - a very high sound quality was obtained. The only difference, in the Philips players, is that this is temporarily multiplied by a factor of four. As well as allowing 16 bit-equivalent performance, this also offers additional benefits......"

Many 1st gen CD players were not 16-bit, they were 14-bit.

I'm sorry for disturbing the audio taliban but wtf.

 

[AnalogSteph]

These early machines really are quite competent, even if filter ripple and THD / IMD(+N) obviously are not up to modern standards. These Philips/Marantz players do not seem to be bothered by intersample-overs either, reproducing them faithfully - more than you can say about some late-'90s jobs when incorporating upsamplers became all the rage for a while (alas, at exactly the time when the loudness wars were in full swing - a real *facepalm* moment). IMHO, CD playback was basically solved by 1994.

1st gen CD players were not 16-bit, they were 14-bit.

Nobody was doubting that they were using 14-bit DACs (TDA1540). If you actually bother to read the SAA7030 datasheet, you will find that

2. It performs noise shaping so that a 14-bit DAC yields the same in-band quantizing signal-to-noise ratio as from a 16-bit DAC supplied with unprocessed 44,1 kHz samples.

Those Philips engineers were a clever bunch. Mind you, 14 bits at 4X OS is giving you 15 bits effective to begin with, so it would have been maybe 2nd-order noise shaping tops, but using any at all in 1983-ish is pretty wild. The 98 dB(A) SNR found in CD54 lab testing basically confirms the claim.

As for the OP's question, I would not generally bother with a CD player but just rip everything, especially those releases that aren't available on streaming. 200 CDs isn't an unmanageable amount, and prioritizing may leave you with only a few dozen to start with. While ripping can generally be done with more or less free software like "old faithful" EAC, some investment into e.g. dBpoweramp may be worth it to get access to some decent metadata providers. That's the part that often tends to hold you up the longest - ripping a CD in itself is a matter of maybe 5 minutes even if limiting speed to 24X (I do not consider putting undue stress on the bearings just for half a minute less ripping time a worthwhile tradeoff).

 

[julian_hughes]

Nobody was doubting that they were using 14-bit DACs (TDA1540).

Actually they were. But never mind. Long live the new flesh/god is great/whatever.