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Wes said:
No evidence suggests that CD players used as transports will sound different from each other, nor are there engineering reasons to suspect they might.

But why not rip them to a HDD/SSD on your computer? Smaller footprint and you save $500 - not to mention the convenience.
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There's the nostalgia of pulling a crisp and shiny CD out of its plastic case!
 
Wes said:
and using it as a drink coaster?
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When I was in college, these were the only coasters I needed…
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I'm going to dig up this thread because a comment I found, supposedly made by a chap on audioreview.com about a TASCAM CD-160 in 2008 made me question the subject of this thread. I'll post the relevant section here:
On the bench I noted that the optical pickup is the KSS213, the most widely used and least costly on the market. As optics inevitably wear out, a cheap and readily available replacement is a big plus. Unfortunately, the design of the board requires a lengthy signal path from the mech to the main board, resulting in signal loss rendering the read sensitivity to merely mediocre. To compensate, the unit has electronic shock protection, which works well, but only if the disc is clear enough to be read by the inherently weak optical system.
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If the sort of design faults he's alluding to are legitimate ones, then how can someone looking to get a CD player, either new or used, be sure that their model doesn't have them?
 
"Unfortunately, the design of the board requires a lengthy signal path from the mech to the main board, resulting in signal loss rendering the read sensitivity to merely mediocre. To compensate, the unit has electronic shock protection, which works well, but only if the disc is clear enough to be read by the inherently weak optical system."

I've repaired thousands of Sony CD players with the KSS213 optical pickup and they all have a RF board mounted within the length of a flexible printed circuit (FPC) that is no longer than ~3" or 7.5cm. The RF amplifier and other associated circuitry is on the RF board as well as the servos and other important circuits that rely on being near the mechanism. I have never seen any evidence to support the quote you posted here.
 
Kaiede said:
With the right setup, I do think streaming is the better call. I’m running across more independent music where I can cheaply get 24bit, 44-96kHz FLAC, but may only be able to get a physical copy on vinyl if at all. The drawback is that there seems to always be some sort of downside to streaming no matter how you set it up right now, and I don’t think it really ever got to the “it just works” stage.
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There is roon - for the people with deep pockets, or the LMS environment with a phletora of DIY player devices, with analogue or digital outputs. Beautiful front-end apps.

Streaming of course, yeah, you find way more, but the tendency is that you don't sit down to listen to an album anymore. Of course I'm not the one to tell you how you should listen to music, that's a different experience for everyone.

For me it's a combo, spotify to look up new things (or run into them) and hires downloads to LMS for great quality stuff. Before we get into a hires vs redbook discussion - hires downloads usually (not always) have different/better/more dynamic mastering. You can even downsample that stuff back to redbook and still have a great experience. But then, storage is cheap these days. but I digress...
 
The whole problem with streaming is that you don't really own anything, you just rent it and you never know if what you like will still be available tomorrow or not, not to mention changes in mixes without any warnings. As for Roon there is Audirvana that costs fraction of it and unless you have a very complex multiroom setup I do not really see any advantage of Roon but YMMV.

Coming back to CD transports. Music is about magic and there is something magical at least to some of us in silver (or gold for that matter) disc spinning. Just sit and relax. No setup fiddling, no upgrades, no missing tracks, no breaking wifi connections, no flimsy mobile apps etc. also adds to the complete feeling. Secondly if you like to play with upsampling (please note that I am not trying to transplant the discussion from M Scaler thread here) the only setup that worked flawlessly out of the box for me was my cd transport. All software solutions always had some issues with my dacs.

Last but not least I've been able to read coupe of unreadable for different cd players/transports CDs using 20USD external dvd drive but my current cd transport is able to read those disc too.

So coming back to main topic question: are they all the same? Not in my book. My 20USD external dvd drive while working alright provides a lot of noise and has not remote, I need to turn on a computer to use it. On the other hand my CD transport is almost dead silent, does only need external dac, has a remote and provides upsampling options that can be easily disabled. Even the remotes are different and can make a difference since not all provides track number selection feature for example. So in the end the answers is: no, not all are created equal. Even assuming they all sound the same there are still important differences between them.
 
HansHolland said:
When listening to the rip, you can still hold the plastic CD case in hands, look at the artwork.
And as a bonus look at the CD.
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Only sometimes, I power up my fathers restored Philips CD100, get one of the old CDs from the cabinet (or even new ones, not available via streaming), listen and smell the vapors from the almost 40y old hot circuit boards...not much sonic difference compared to ripped on computer audio btw...
 
Turns out, you can't be certain that your CD player isn't doing some processing on the digital audio output. I was using a twenty year old Denon CD player (DCD-755AR) to feed, via optical, a Simaudio Moon 280D DAC, and the analogue output was giving me a noise floor of -115dBA+, which is impossible for 16-bit audio. I tested out a DVD player as well, and it was doing the same thing.

After a lot of playing around, I decided that the Denon (and the DVD player as well) were increasing the bit depth of the digital output signal. The 16-bit digital zero in the test signal was being converted to a 20-bit digital zero, and thus giving a spurious, false result. I don't expect that it would happen with regular program material. But one effect of this processing by the Denon was to increase THD and IMD by an order of magnitude. (Well, something did anyway.) Story here. (I didn't come here to tout the story, incidentally. I was googling for reviews of the CXC, because I've just ordered one, and led here. If something weird happens with the measurements of this one, I'll report it.)
 
and the analogue output was giving me a noise floor of -115dBA+, which is impossible for 16-bit audio. I tested out a DVD player as well, and it was doing the same thing.
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There is always analog noise.

The 16-bit digital zero in the test signal was being converted to a 20-bit digital zero
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In the digital domain (i.e. on the digital-side of the DAC) zero is exactly zero no matter the bit depth and that's minus infinity dB.
 
Harmonie said:
After all these years collecting those cd's ... it would be painful to put them all in a carton and forget about those. It's a generation cleavage.
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Hello All,

There is another reason to rip all your CD's to a hard drive that matters to some of us. When you can put them all on a hard drive or other media, then you have a backup in case the CD's get destroyed. Fire, theft, scratches, etc. seem the most likely. I keep my backup drive in a waterproof ziplocked baggie in my firebox so hopefully I will never have to say I lost everything. About every six months I do an update, so it stays pretty current. FWIW.
 
solderdude said:
Still not that simple as it would be impossible to get them synchronized so switching inputs on a DAC is bound to result in issues. But amplitude variations in the final output won't be a problem.
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Right, but one could silence and then switch or not. But it would still be silent.
 
Harmonie said:
After all these years collecting those cd's ... it would be painful to put them all in a carton and forget about those. It's a generation cleavage.
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Well, I have done it. It was about 5000 CDs so it freed up a lot of space in my listening room!
 
Gregss said:
Hello All,

There is another reason to rip all your CD's to a hard drive that matters to some of us. When you can put them all on a hard drive or other media, then you have a backup in case the CD's get destroyed. Fire, theft, scratches, etc. seem the most likely. I keep my backup drive in a waterproof ziplocked baggie in my firebox so hopefully I will never have to say I lost everything. About every six months I do an update, so it stays pretty current. FWIW.
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Ahhhh, like some Swiss, I wish I would have an atomic shelter .
 
Gregss said:
Hello All,

There is another reason to rip all your CD's to a hard drive that matters to some of us. When you can put them all on a hard drive or other media, then you have a backup in case the CD's get destroyed. Fire, theft, scratches, etc. seem the most likely. I keep my backup drive in a waterproof ziplocked baggie in my firebox so hopefully I will never have to say I lost everything. About every six months I do an update, so it stays pretty current. FWIW.
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Use more than one backup then. It is easier to damage a hard drive than a CD.
I have multiple backups.
 
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