Let's talk CD Players!

[Wes]

I'd like to see a CD revival so I can unload some of mine.

 

[levimax]

I'd like to see a CD revival so I can unload some of mine.

Do you have any of the original made in Japan for the US CD's? PM me a list and maybe I can take some off your hands.

 

[Carnatux]

Currently have a sony DVP-NC80V from a thrift store for $10, have it hooked up to topping E30.
I have a small collection of 600 cds and just wanted a dedicated player for them, kinda like a turntable but just for cds. The prices for theses are so low so why not have one!. Long live physical media!

Honestly these past years have been the best for collecting cds as most thrift stores price them for around 25 cents!

 

[levimax]

Currently have a sony DVP-NC80V from a thrift store for $10, have it hooked up to topping E30.
I have a small collection of 600 cds and just wanted a dedicated player for them, kinda like a turntable but just for cds. The prices for theses are so low so why not have one!. Long live physical media!

Honestly these past years have been the best for collecting cds as most thrift stores price them for around 25 cents!
View attachment 142316

Nice player.... it even plays SACDs! I notice you are using a outboard DAC.... can you tell any difference between the DAC in the player and the Topping? I have been using a thrift store player for awhile and just using it's analog outputs and have been surprised how good it sounds.

 

[Carnatux]

Nice player.... it even plays SACDs! I notice you are using a outboard DAC.... can you tell any difference between the DAC in the player and the Topping? I have been using a thrift store player for awhile and just using it's analog outputs and have been surprised how good it sounds.

Honestly don't hear any difference at all. My stereo gear is more budget than my headphone setup so I don't think an external DAC makes much difference. I "upgraded" my headphone DAC so now the E30 is on stereo/tv duty.

2.1 Stereo set: Speakers: micca rb42
Amp: SMSL SA:300
SUB: Dayton audio SUB800 8"
As you can see the gear is bottom of the barrel but that was before I discovered ASR. Gotta start somewhere lol.

 

[Herbert]

If we had access to 16/48k studio masters then maybe it might be possible that a downloaded file created from such a master might sound slightly better than a CD, but I doubt it.

Standard is 24/96 or 24/48 (especdially broadcast) but you are darn right.
I am sometimes involved in CD production and never, ever noticed a difference when downsampling
from 24/96 to 16/44.1.
My brain once even tricked me to think the CD sounded better.
I guess the reason is that I was more relaxed listening to the finished product
whereas editing the concert video on the finished 24/96 studio-master
gave me always a little bit of stress...

 

[rdenney]

Your post is probably the most thoughtful and accurate assessment I've ever read .. Bravo !

Lacking the visual and tactile appeal, the intrinsic value - if any - of the CD format is possibly in the 'archival' (longevity) quality of the discs. At least for the average Joe consumer.

CD 'rot' aside, tape when stored properly and cared for can also survive for long periods - or at least that's my perception ( which may not be accurate....) But then the typical consumer -who can be brutal on every format,- may find CD's to survive longer, though there may be no clear winner here...

Bottom line for me, is I'll hold on the the discs if for no other reason than the extreme possibility that streaming may suddenly disappear one day..

Meant to submit this yesterday--may no longer be relevant to the conversation.

With the exception of CD rot, which has affected precisely zero of the CD's I own, the format is quite durable. The players, not so much, particularly the price-point transports being sold these days. But I've been able to preserve the format well enough. I have some CD's that look like they've been cleaned with sandpaper and still read in good decks (not, seemingly, in the low-grade transports currently available, however).

But tape is more fragile by any measure. I've never had CD rot, but I have certainly had Sticky Shed Syndrome with tapes. I keep the tape formats alive until I can get my content recorded onto the computer (from which I will burn CD's for archival storage--and I have a largish stash of very high quality CD-R's for making durable recorded CDs).

Everything fails eventually. Keeping historical formats alive is part of the hobby for some of us.

Rick "who doesn't mind physical media on display in the house" Denney

 

[sq225917]

Only ever had one cd turn that rusty brown

 

[MarkS]

I have a small collection of 600 cds

I have a collection of 600 cds and I thought that was a pretty big number ... my wife certainly thinks that!

 

[Herbert]

the format is quite durable. The players, not so much, particularly the price-point transports being sold these days.

For more than 10 years, after Philips silently left the market as supplier,
only 3 mechanisms were available: Sony KHM-313 / Sanyo DM-31 /Hitachi HOP-1200.
That's all. No matter if it was a boombox or High End machine worth 9000$, like Accuphase,
who used the very cheap KHM-313.
AFAIK the Sanyo and Hitachi pickups are combined diodes/optics to read DVD/SACD besides CD.
It was up to the company who bought these transports (i.e. Pro-Ject here in Europe) if this feature was used or not.

Listening to Ralph Towner's "City of Eyes" from 1989 on a Nakamichi OMS-5 from 1986 while typing this
so I guess yes, quite durable...

 

[Sombreuil]

The aesthetics of CDs is a matter of age perspective, I expect. It’s not as mechanically interesting as vinyl for those of us who grew up with vinyl. But “children of the 80’s” might see CDs with different eyes. Maybe not. We’ll see when they reach the “nostalgic for our youth” stage.

I was born in the late '80s and heard a vinyl for the first time in my early 20s. It's an interesting in-between era because people of my age were too young to have had their own vinyl, yet we had our parents' collection, lots of cassette tapes and of course CDs.

I believe the main difference between my generation compared to the previous one (CD vs vinyl that is) is that, most of the time I couldn't care less about the CD itself, it was more about the booklet and the whole pachaging. Whereas people who grew up with vinyl seem to have a more "organic" feeling with the object itself.

 

[sonci99]

so, "scientifically" speaking is there a reason why cd players sound this good? I mean shouldn't something build in the 80s sound like crap compared to modern dacs?
Everybody say digital has come a long way, but honestly try to listen to a good cd player anything from Sony or Naim or even Denon or Technics..
Most sound very good, certainly not a night and day difference with modern dacs and in some cases better.

 

[Smislov]

More than 1500+ CD and counting
JungSon Magic Boat 2

And I compere Onkyo DX7222 audio with digital to Topping D30 ... Topping have a more better sound. I hope that I will compare YungSon with SMSL m500 and SMSL M6 and Sabaj d5

 

[rdenney]

so, "scientifically" speaking is there a reason why cd players sound this good? I mean shouldn't something build in the 80s sound like crap compared to modern dacs?
Everybody say digital has come a long way, but honestly try to listen to a good cd player anything from Sony or Naim or even Denon or Technics..
Most sound very good, certainly not a night and day difference with modern dacs and in some cases better.

Scientifically speaking, CD players of the late 80's and 90's had already achieved functional transparency for most listeners (me included).

It also means that the 16-bit file is likely to sound the same through a 16-bit DAC as it would through a 32-bit DAC, and a 44.1 KHz sample rate will sound the same played back at 44.1 KHz than if upsampled to 192 KHz. But saying those statements presupposes that one can hear the difference between 16/44 and 32/192 (or really anything in between), which is not in evidence at least for most people.

My Topping E30 is the DAC for my Cambridge CXC transport, but I've also played that transport through a Musical Fidelity V90 DAC. I can't hear any difference at all between them. I can't hear any difference at all between my Tascam CD-401 with its 90's-era Burr-Brown DAC or when the digital output is fed through either of the above later-model DACs. I can't tell the difference between any of the above and my Naim CD5 player. I can't hear any difference between any of the above an a Cambridge Audio D500SE CD player from the late 90's. Thus, I conclude that for me CD playback was functionally transparent by the time I bought my first CD player, a Magnavox CDB-650.

This does not surprise me. 16/44 is nominally capable of 96 dB S/N, and for me that's about 15 or 20 dB better than what I can hear. And it's orders of magnitude better than the speakers or headphones I'm hearing it through.

Some of those players manage faulty disks better than others, and some are easier to service and keep going than others. Some have better remotes, and some don't have remotes at all. Some have better displays than others. But they all sound the same to me.

Rick "who can hear the faults in compressed formats, sometimes, but not differences in lossless formats at 16/44 and above" Denney

 

[MarkS]

I bought the original Philips/Magnavox FD1000SL in the summer of 1984. It sounded fantastic. I replaced it many years later only because it did not have a remote.

Today I use a consumer-level Marantz player, the CD5003, bought in 2008 after an electrician accidentally fried the circuit my previous one was plugged into (and I no longer remember what it was ...).

 

[sonci99]

Scientifically speaking, CD players of the late 80's and 90's had already achieved functional transparency for most listeners (me included).

It also means that the 16-bit file is likely to sound the same through a 16-bit DAC as it would through a 32-bit DAC, and a 44.1 KHz sample rate will sound the same played back at 44.1 KHz than if upsampled to 192 KHz. But saying those statements presupposes that one can hear the difference between 16/44 and 32/192 (or really anything in between), which is not in evidence at least for most people.

My Topping E30 is the DAC for my Cambridge CXC transport, but I've also played that transport through a Musical Fidelity V90 DAC. I can't hear any difference at all between them. I can't hear any difference at all between my Tascam CD-401 with its 90's-era Burr-Brown DAC or when the digital output is fed through either of the above later-model DACs. I can't tell the difference between any of the above and my Naim CD5 player. I can't hear any difference between any of the above an a Cambridge Audio D500SE CD player from the late 90's. Thus, I conclude that for me CD playback was functionally transparent by the time I bought my first CD player, a Magnavox CDB-650.

This does not surprise me. 16/44 is nominally capable of 96 dB S/N, and for me that's about 15 or 20 dB better than what I can hear. And it's orders of magnitude better than the speakers or headphones I'm hearing it through.

Some of those players manage faulty disks better than others, and some are easier to service and keep going than others. Some have better remotes, and some don't have remotes at all. Some have better displays than others. But they all sound the same to me.

Rick "who can hear the faults in compressed formats, sometimes, but not differences in lossless formats at 16/44 and above" Denney

I hear differences from all my cd players, maybe because of filters. I cannot pick them always but some are bright, some bass heavy etc.
Its strange that you hear everything the same, even if dac are the same, reconstruction filters change the sound. What speakers are you using?

 

[rdenney]

I hear differences from all my cd players, maybe because of filters. I cannot pick them always but some are bright, some bass heavy etc.
Its strange that you hear everything the same, even if dac are the same, reconstruction filters change the sound. What speakers are you using?

The more relevant question is what ears am I using? If a filter rolls off the top end by a dB or two at 19 KHz, like the Naim does, I'll never hear it.

More to the point, those who do hear differences can't really assert that those differences are real until they have done a bit of controlled testing, because the differences are just too subtle to be sure they are not influenced by biases, both conscious and unconscious. That I hear no difference does not require such control. So, "strange" in your parlance is that there are differences to be heard.

But, to answer your question, I drew my conclusion based on 1.) Advents (that won't persuade you), 2.) Revel F12 (that shouldn't persuade you), 3.) various headphones, paticularly AKG K371's and Koss Pro4S's (which should reveal what there is assuming I can hear it).

Rick "just sayin'" Denney

 

[Mart68]

I hear differences from all my cd players, maybe because of filters. I cannot pick them always but some are bright, some bass heavy etc.
Its strange that you hear everything the same, even if dac are the same, reconstruction filters change the sound. What speakers are you using?

Not all CD players have a flat frequency response so that could account for it. Also there was the odd one or two that might have had some deliberately induced harmonic distortion that may have been audible - The DPA Renaissance for example.

 

[sonci99]

I agree that differences are minimal in audio, it’s not like comparing an Amd Threadripper to an Intel pentium III, but still for a lot of players you can hear different sound and if music is mastered correctly as is for most first pressing cds, music enjoyment is different.
I prefer spinning cds to streaming just for the act of listening a full album and reading the booklet, cd format is well alive for me..

 

[MarkS]

It's just wrong to make a flat statement like "for a lot of players you can hear different sound" if you haven't verified it by listening blind.

Back in the 90s I had a cheap Sony portable CD player with me on a visit to a friend who had just bought (after careful listening!) a Rotel CD player that he was absolutely sure sounded much better than the average consumer-level player. So we hooked up my cheap Sony portable with a cheap Radio Shack miniplug-to-RCA cable to his system (Rotel electronics, fancy cables, and Mirage speakers) and did some blind listening. My friend's wife did the switching. It turned out to be necessary to have the portable running (with some random CD in it) even when the Rotel was playing the test CD, because the portable's spinning was loud enough to hear across the room.

I'm sure you can guess the result. When one of us thought we heard a difference (always very fleeting and hard to pin down), we were wrong as often as we were right.

"Well anyway it looks nice" was my friend's conclusion about his Rotel player.