Do CD players sound different to each other?

[antcollinet]

No. Too much dynamic compression to increase loudness is an element of (bad) sound quality. Too little compression is equally bad, if not worse.

Thanks for the correction - but I don't thing there is much doubt about what we suffer most from.

 

[coonmanx]

Two very good sounding CD players that I own. The Panasonic is from 1995 and the JVC is also from around that same time. The Scott DA-952A that I have in the bedroom is from the late 80s...

 

[Azazello13]

Why not second-hand records? Because I want to be the first owner. New is new.
Such a question for experts. What affects the sound of the CD player the most?
A user from the Polish audio forum wrote to me that the quality of the CD itself. I guess not silly, huh?

If you're removing speakers and everything, then the recording (CD) itself is at least 90% of overall sound quality.

If you're just talking about the CD player:
1) any kind of signal processing the unit might be doing. these "modes" always make it sound like crap. sometimes you have to find some obscure menu to defeat them.
2) the DAC, but this is only applicable if you are using analog outputs
3) the actual laser/reading mechanism. quality here can vary quite a bit actually. DVD and Bluray players tend to have more tightly calibrated lasers due to increased data density in those formats vs CD. But there is no subtle "nuance" here. If it seems like your player can read everything you throw at it without clearly audible problems, then this is likely not an issue at all for your player.

everything else is woooo. any money you spend in this area is likely to be wasted, as far as sound quality. If something looks nice with the rest of your system or your furniture, or you like the display or the remote, then whatever floats your boat.

 

[formdissolve]

One of my favorite players was a 90s Japanese Discman, the Sony D-25S (S for silver). Had a rechargeable battery (which lasted a decent amount of time when new), 9v power supply, a wired remote, built in stabilizer puck on top of the door, 4x oversampling, and line out (!).. Sounded awesome and was my main CD player for about 2 years. Even the headphone out wasn't that bad, even if I rarely used it. Sadly, I sold it for way too cheap about 10 years ago. It developed issues as all those old players do, especially on the laser. Kind of want to track another one down, but they're expensive now! I'd be curious what the Line Out SINAD would be...

 

[BentonF]

A few Naimees or ex-Naim owners here. What do you all make of their CD players? They come in for high praise by the breadth of the hifi community. Good performance, improving sonics up the range, quality components and good service (though some have been retired due to lack of optical drives in short supply).

 

[Doodski]

A few Naimees or ex-Naim owners here. What do you all make of their CD players? They come in for high praise by the breadth of the hifi community. Good performance, improving sonics up the range, quality components and good service (though some have been retired due to lack of optical drives in short supply).

Is that a proprietary potted IC that I circled in red? What are those?

 

[Waxx]

I used a very cheap generic brand dvd player with a Philips mechanism for years as cd player, but coupled over spdif to a decent convertor, first an Musical Fidelity Digilog (i got for very cheap and sold again for way to much money to a collector), and later a Cambridge DagMacic100 that i still use (but now with a pc and a streamer). The standard dac was very bad, even for that time i got it (2004)

And with the external dac it sounded as good as some expensive models that were arround. A cd player has no sound, it's dac may have it, but not the player mechanism and the digital part itself as it's pure digital. It works or it doesn't work and skips or just does nothing. The only difference that can be made is in the dac concerning sound. So a very cheap cd player with a digital out can sound as good as a very expensive model on the digital out, and then it's just you who need to connect a decent dac to get good sound. And decent dac's can be found for about 100€ as was proved on this site

 

[Adi777]

I like this one. Nice, elegance style.

 

[tetragrammaton]

Then you don't want to read this: https://www.discogs.com/digs/collecting/cd-comeback-trend-popularity-sales-2022



I am patiently waiting for the 8-track revival... any day now.

MiniDisc and compact cassette deserve to make a comeback!

 

[Rednaxela]

This thread not so much though...

 

[EJ3]

As I've mentioned before, in the late 90's I did two sets of blind tests between a Sony CD player, Meridian CD Player and a Meitner DAC (level matched with voltmeter). It was easy to tell them apart even under the blind conditions.

Which is weird because I'm generally skeptical about the differences in digital gear playing good ol redbook standard (and don't really care much about it these days). But...those were my results back then.

I had a Benchmark DAC 1 for many years and now have a Benchmark DAC2L, and I seriously doubt I'd be able to tell the difference.

I had a very early Magnavox that sounded great. I bought a Sony carousel about 2 years later and gave the Magnavox to some friends. That Sony turned out to be just about the worst thing that I ever heard a CD on. Maybe the were competing with COBY before I ever heard of COBY.
I do not stream anything. But my oPPo 205 UDP sounds great with any disk that I have ever put into it (it has been modified to accept all regions).

 

[Down South]

I had a first generation Marantz CD63. Probably because I was using a 70s Technics amp and a pair of AR 3as, great bass but the rest was crap I wasn't impressed. Moved on to another Marantz the 63KI which I found sounded better than the much vaunted first gen.63 and I used it from 92 - 2016, only the on/off button packed up.

In 2022 I bought another Marantz the 6007. It sounds great and has an excellent h/amp. I have yet to try the digital section as I've had to wait to get my s/hand Puffin updated so that I can digitise my LPs.

I agree with the comments of so many, given decent design/materials used to construct the CDP, the sound of CD must come down to the DAC used and the quality of the CD itself. Some are really good. Via Intermezzo or maybe Stingray (I cannot rec. these 2 TV channels enough and it's not only music, seriously check them out, I get them for free via the French company Bouygues) Anyway I got to hear a Swedish Jazz trio - EST and bought 3 of their CDs, superb sound and wasn't aware that I was listening to CD. The Japanese also turn out very good sounding CDs. I'm not and never will be into streaming. Firstly it's an even worse rip-off for artists that record companies ever were. If they get together and act as one as those people who work in Hollywood did then streaming will become, as it should do very expensive and you get to own nothing. The cloud is a complete misnomer as the cloud is in fact big sheds built in the middle of nowhere consuming vast amounts of electricity and with little effort can be destroyed completely. Once one of these sheds is destroyed then teams of highly paid guards will be needed. Combine that with proper remuneration for the creators of content and it will become very expensive. I like to own my music and when I've digitised my physical media most has a high resale price.

 

[jsrtheta]

If you're removing speakers and everything, then the recording (CD) itself is at least 90% of overall sound quality.

If you're just talking about the CD player:
1) any kind of signal processing the unit might be doing. these "modes" always make it sound like crap. sometimes you have to find some obscure menu to defeat them.
2) the DAC, but this is only applicable if you are using analog outputs
3) the actual laser/reading mechanism. quality here can vary quite a bit actually. DVD and Bluray players tend to have more tightly calibrated lasers due to increased data density in those formats vs CD. But there is no subtle "nuance" here. If it seems like your player can read everything you throw at it without clearly audible problems, then this is likely not an issue at all for your player.

everything else is woooo. any money you spend in this area is likely to be wasted, as far as sound quality. If something looks nice with the rest of your system or your furniture, or you like the display or the remote, then whatever floats your boat.

This is anecdotal, but true. I did a double blind test of a Theta DS Pro Gen Va (massively overbuilt, about $8k new) against a PS Audio DL-3 (PS' bottom rung). DAC chips were, IIRC, Burr Brown PCM63PK in the Theta, Burr Brown PCM1702 in the PS Audio.

Couldn't reliably distinguish between the two, no matter how hard I tried.

 

[Down South]

But people with money love to pay for bling and status. How often do you see uber expensive power cords selling for US$1-2K and the company spiel is we can't possibly talk about the materials used or the construction because our competitors will copy it - so what's to stop said competitors buying one, stripping it down will expose the construction and get a metallurgist to identify exactly exactly the composition of the conductors - nothing at all.

 

[DSJR]

I had a first generation Marantz CD63. Probably because I was using a 70s Technics amp and a pair of AR 3as, great bass but the rest was crap I wasn't impressed. Moved on to another Marantz the 63KI which I found sounded better than the much vaunted first gen.63 and I used it from 92 - 2016, only the on/off button packed up.

In 2022 I bought another Marantz the 6007. It sounds great and has an excellent h/amp. I have yet to try the digital section as I've had to wait to get my s/hand Puffin updated so that I can digitise my LPs.

I agree with the comments of so many, given decent design/materials used to construct the CDP, the sound of CD must come down to the DAC used and the quality of the CD itself. Some are really good. Via Intermezzo or maybe Stingray (I cannot rec. these 2 TV channels enough and it's not only music, seriously check them out, I get them for free via the French company Bouygues) Anyway I got to hear a Swedish Jazz trio - EST and bought 3 of their CDs, superb sound and wasn't aware that I was listening to CD. The Japanese also turn out very good sounding CDs. I'm not and never will be into streaming. Firstly it's an even worse rip-off for artists that record companies ever were. If they get together and act as one as those people who work in Hollywood did then streaming will become, as it should do very expensive and you get to own nothing. The cloud is a complete misnomer as the cloud is in fact big sheds built in the middle of nowhere consuming vast amounts of electricity and with little effort can be destroyed completely. Once one of these sheds is destroyed then teams of highly paid guards will be needed. Combine that with proper remuneration for the creators of content and it will become very expensive. I like to own my music and when I've digitised my physical media most has a high resale price.

The 63KI player was a nasty thing, but the perceived extra 'deeeeetail' sold it to legions of WTF 5* review followers with a Rotel 965 tweaked model in hot pursuit. Not a comfortable listen and the popularity of the thing clouded our UK attention away from mid to upper Denons and remaining Sony's at this price (not sure JVC's nice mid to upper level machines were over here by this time). the CD63 original unmolested version sounded superb in a Krell/Apogee system I remember (used as a stop-gap on the way to the twenty grand Krell digital player of the time and the 63's 'friendly' sound - no grain or added sharpness - shocked said system owner). Other than that, we had Arcam which tweaked their players around 5* reviews-by-hacks for far too long in my opinion...

Thank heavens those days are gone now... I have a still running (skin of teeth thing though) and much used Denon 1520 CD player (heavy, internally complex and with that lovely rapid-track-access CD drive which I believe is a Sony?) as well as a gifted Denon 1015 from a few years later (much lighter, plainer and much simpler internally). Both of these are indistinguishable from each other in casual listening and although I don't remember the former machine when new, I do remember how even handed the latter was at its then £320 price, doing nothing wrong subjectively.

 

[Haskil]

But people with money love to pay for bling and status. How often do you see uber expensive power cords selling for US$1-2K and the company spiel is we can't possibly talk about the materials used or the construction because our competitors will copy it - so what's to stop said competitors buying one, stripping it down will expose the construction and get a metallurgist to identify exactly exactly the composition of the conductors - nothing at all.

By stripping certain cables we can sometimes find the industrial reference used by the hifi company which just found it in the catalog of a large industrial cable drawing company... it is visible printed on the original sheath buried under layers mysterious insulators added to make people believe that the cable in question is a marvel of homemade technology...

 

[Down South]

The 63KI player was a nasty thing, but the perceived extra 'deeeeetail' sold it to legions of WTF 5* review followers with a Rotel 965 tweaked model in hot pursuit. Not a comfortable listen and the popularity of the thing clouded our UK attention away from mid to upper Denons and remaining Sony's at this price (not sure JVC's nice mid to upper level machines were over here by this time). the CD63 original unmolested version sounded superb in a Krell/Apogee system I remember (used as a stop-gap on the way to the twenty grand Krell digital player of the time and the 63's 'friendly' sound - no grain or added sharpness - shocked said system owner). Other than that, we had Arcam which tweaked their players around 5* reviews-by-hacks for far too long in my opinion...

Thank heavens those days are gone now... I have a still running (skin of teeth thing though) and much used Denon 1520 CD player (heavy, internally complex and with that lovely rapid-track-access CD drive which I believe is a Sony?) as well as a gifted Denon 1015 from a few years later (much lighter, plainer and much simpler internally). Both of these are indistinguishable from each other in casual listening and although I don't remember the former machine when new, I do remember how even handed the latter was at its then £320 price, doing nothing wrong subjectively.

And arrogantly,nowhere in your post do we find 'in my opinion'.

 

[Haskil]

And arrogantly,nowhere in your post do we find 'in my opinion'.

Frankly, the hospital is making fun of charity here...

Furthermore, I used a CD 63 for a long time, which I still have stored in its box. He was in no way "shit" as you say so peremptorily and definitively. I don't need to add "in my opinion" of pure rhetorical precaution here and there in my answer, because it's me who writes it... Like our friend DSJR gave his own.

 

[Willem]

I moved from an early Philips CD player to a Marantz (I think) DVD player to a cheap Panasonic Bluray player, and more recently the latter playing into an RME ADI-2 DAC. Although I never compared them properly I do not think there weas any sonic difference. So my view is that the best option is to use the optical/coax output of a Bluray or UHDBR player into a decent DAC, and stop worrying about sound quality. The only challenge is that many cheaper (UHD)Bluray players no longer have optical or coaxial digital outputs.

 

[DanielT]

My friend came across an old Marantz CD73 player, where there were some problems with the mechanics. The sledge didn't work as intended for example. Now he has fixed it and will sell the player. He and I were surprised at the amount of money these old vintage CD players were being advertised for.

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I have listened to it and what can I say, hmm? It worked and sounded like any other CD player I've heard. I personally use a Sony Blu-ray player (bought used for $25) with digital out plugged into my Topping E30 DAC if I use CDs. Works fine for me. I wouldn't trade that combo for a Marantz CD73 even if I got that player for free.

Here are pictures of his Marantz CD73. He is trying to sell it for $460. We'll see if anyone is interested. It is completely incomprehensible to me how anyone wants to spend so much money on a really old CD player. But okay I don't criticize other people's hobbies and choices. People can do what they want.

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Edit:
However, I can understand spending money on a good vintage amp/receiver. There you can actually get good performance for little money.
That is as long as you don't buy one of the most sought-after models.