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Do CD players sound different to each other?

Old Iron said:
I actually wanted to launch this question about CD players sound differences. At the risk that I have not had a chance to read this thread. Because of client deadline demands!
I will offer up my knowledge. These days most all CD players in quality brands have all these boxes check.

Good to excellent transport. Good to excellent DAC's with good to excellent output stages. OK to excellent clock jitter management. OK to excellent power supply's.
So the common denominator?

The bit error correction algorithm.

When Sony decided to get into the state of the art digital studio recording machines. Part of a challenge to the Ampex ATR analog two track mastering machines. Also as well the Studer machines. Sony went way big!

Sony that already had decades of experience with with the U-Matic system. And they had bought the patents from Ampex for the rotary head video commercial machines.
They were smart as hell. They realized if they can make a digital multi track studio machines. That can still be be spliced and edited by hand like an analog machine. It would kill the competition. Welcome to the DASH format. Hand cut a 2, 24, 48 Track tape like and audio tape and have the error correction recover all that stuff!!!! F%#ing Genius!
But how?

www.vintagedigital.com.au

The Extraordinary Sony PCM-3348HR Digital Multitrack Recorder

The Sony PCM-3348HR is a 48-channel 24-bit/16-bit digital audio recorder, using 1/2-inch tape in DASH (Digital Audio Stationary Head) and DASH PLUS formats.
www.vintagedigital.com.au www.vintagedigital.com.au

Some of this error correction algorithm has made it into some of the better consumer equipment!
Tascam professional CD RW have a killer algorithm.

For higher end CD players. All made by Sony. I want to harvest these chips and reverse engineer them into new systems.
I have tons of info to back all this up.
Click to expand...
I don't know what track you're on (maybe it's the VHS tapes?), but you're on the wrong track.
I know the old Sony machines and even worked with them in the 90s, but they were already outdated by then. But really nice pieces.

But the algorithms you are talking about were only necessary for reading out the faulty digital data in the systems of the time, especially the tapes.
Since the CD and storage of digital data on solid media, this is all a story and any kind of recovery algorithms are only needed for damaged data, everything else is just a fairy tale.
Also read my post #109.
Back then, around 23 years ago, we also did tests with various HiFi CD players, including the very affordable Technics SL-PG4. The read rate was 99.99-100% without any intervention, both on pressed and burned discs.

And as already mentioned, we are talking about tests at the BIT level. With 100% read data, there is no additional information that an algorithm could work with.
 
Some still don't get it, digital data does not change during transfer, and errors are corrected by the system or no signal is given. That is the whole concept of digital, and why it's in theory better than analog. The only issue is getting the data from digital to analog in a high fidelity. But the medium, mechanical transport and so have no influence on the sound, only on the good mechanical working of the device.

So all cd players sound the same if you use the same dac and analog part. That is where the difference in sound is. The rest is not that important, but on mechanical or durability level. Even the lazer is not that important, as long as it can read the data consistantly from the medium (which is established tech) in the conditions it's used.

As far as a cd player is still needed (preference), a digital out connected to a good dac can make all work on toplevel and be bit perfect. On that it's just the same as a phone or computer as digital source.

And all the rest is snakeoil...
 
Waxx said:
Some still don't get it, digital data does not change during transfer, and errors are corrected by the system or no signal is given. That is the whole concept of digital, and why it's in theory better than analog. The only issue is getting the data from digital to analog in a high fidelity. But the medium, mechanical transport and so have no influence on the sound, only on the good mechanical working of the device.

So all cd players sound the same if you use the same dac and analog part. That is where the difference in sound is. The rest is not that important, but on mechanical or durability level. Even the lazer is not that important, as long as it can read the data consistantly from the medium (which is established tech) in the conditions it's used.

As far as a cd player is still needed (preference), a digital out connected to a good dac can make all work on toplevel and be bit perfect. On that it's just the same as a phone or computer as digital source.

And all the rest is snakeoil...
Click to expand...
Just like you said, it couldn't be truer.
The only addition to this would be jitter in the digital area, which can occur anywhere. But with well-developed devices it has never been a problem, the countermeasures work perfectly and the jitter has never been as low as it is today.
 
antcollinet said:
The jitter from any mechanics is eliminated by buffering the data, and clocking it out of the buffer with an accurate clock.

CD - and the ripped version of the CD will sound identical.
Click to expand...
I participated in a jitter test about fifteen years ago : the CD players were connected to external DACs via a QSC device which produced transmission jitter in a precisely adjustable manner... This QSC device is great because it also allows you to practice ABX tests.

Several DACs were used for this test.

The result ? No audible degradation in the sound quality of the tracks played... while the tester gradually increased the Jitter rate... Then came a moment when small clicking noises were heard and finally the moment when the DAC no longer stalled on the signal.

So I wonder what we're talking about when we talk about audible "jitter"...
 
Roland68 said:
The only addition to this would be jitter in the digital area,
Click to expand...
In the digital area jitter is irrelevant. It only matters at the point where the digital data is converted to analogue where the timing of the samples appearing in the analogue signal is important.

However via PLLs and or ASRC or other clock recovery mechanisms, modern DACS are capable of rejecting jitter down to levels an order of magnitude or two lower than anything audible. As we keep saying here, jitter is now a solved problem - even if it was ever an audible issue in the first place.
 
BDWoody said:

what does jitter ACTUALLY sound like?

In a previous post we had an encounter with jitter in audio. The talk about jitter is hard to miss these days. There are plenty of products on the mar...
www.sereneaudio.com www.sereneaudio.com
Click to expand...
I find this article very interesting and informative: Thanks for the link.

However, I see a difference between a signal jittered and transmitted correctly to a DAC to the practical experience to which I was invited which consisted of sending a signal transmitted more and more incorrectly to a DAC of old design (about fifteen years ago)... and which did not give rise to any perceptible difference in sound quality until the dropout... using jitter rates I think largely lower than those of this article whose The default in my opinion is to use colossal jitter rates which we never encounter in practice, but the author says it clearly... and also pieces of music which are not necessarily very discriminating: I am thinking of the periodic jitter which resembles the crying of an LP: a sustained piano or organ sound is very very telling (which is why, as a pianist, I immediately switched to CDs in 1983)...
But hey, I now see what the sound degradation caused by a jitter rate that no one has ever encountered in practice can look like... and which in any case is an outdated problem with modern DACs and asynchronous transmission modes. ...but the audiophile press continues to rave about it...
 
of all the CD players that I have had, and that I still own, I can say that the best is the Meridian 200.
It has no internal DAC or analogue outputs. Probably its mechanical part together with the engineering were so successful that they have led it to be a very good CD player to this day. Moreover with the possibility that I have had over the years of being able to combine it with increasingly modern and high-performance DACs.
I still have his Meridian 263 DAC from back then and the wonderful Meridian 518, a digital science fiction gadget from 20 years ago.
I am also of the opinion that nowadays it is increasingly difficult to perceive differences between devices, which, however, was more likely in the last century, when all games were largely exhausted in the audible range....
 
Roland68 said:
I don't know what track you're on (maybe it's the VHS tapes?), but you're on the wrong track.
I know the old Sony machines and even worked with them in the 90s, but they were already outdated by then. But really nice pieces.

But the algorithms you are talking about were only necessary for reading out the faulty digital data in the systems of the time, especially the tapes.
Since the CD and storage of digital data on solid media, this is all a story and any kind of recovery algorithms are only needed for damaged data, everything else is just a fairy tale.
Also read my post #109.
Back then, around 23 years ago, we also did tests with various HiFi CD players, including the very affordable Technics SL-PG4. The read rate was 99.99-100% without any intervention, both on pressed and burned discs.

And as already mentioned, we are talking about tests at the BIT level. With 100% read data, there is no additional information that an algorithm could work with.
Click to expand...
No time now for a full reply. I made the mistake of rambling a bit.
Never again. I will only offer my best information.
Look for more on this same post.
 
Digby said:
Not much talk about it these days, what with streaming and PC based hi-fi, but was there really any significant difference (improvement) if you paid more for CD players back when they were a big thing. I remember having a very cheap portable Goodmans CD player, which was crap as portable player (no buffer to stop skipping), but the sound from it when stationary seemed, to me, practically indistinguishable from any other CD player when using a good pair of Sennheiser headphones.

This was some time ago though and I'm not sure how accurate these memories are. So, was there really much difference in sound quality between CD players?
Click to expand...
I used to sell Jolida/Black Ice Audio gear and vintage gear. I have had a lot of different CD players. CD players all sound about the same to me. Jolida made a JD100A player with tubes. That sounded a bit different, but I could not say better. The best player I ever had was a Sony 5 disc player with a USB port. I liked recording CDs to a flash drive. I got rid of it because it was too large to fit into my cabinet. Today I am using a Sony DVD player costing $60. Sounds fine with my Rotel amp. I could buy a more substantial, impressive looking player, but it would not sound better. One could buy a $60 DVD player and connect it to a Schiit DAC costing $200 if you feel the need to spend money. Sony is very reliable.
 
They all sound the same. Buy them based on price, build quality, ergonomics, looks, features ,warranty and so forth. Not sound quality
 
pinger said:
They all sound the same. Buy them based on price, build quality, ergonomics, looks, features ,warranty and so forth. Not sound quality
Click to expand...
No, they do not all sound the same (or even close to the same).
Only the better quality ones do.
Even SONY made some cruddy price point ones, helping propagate the myth that they all sound the same (unfortunately I had one) but years later (after swearing off SONY CD players for many years):
I have an old used (but higher up the line SONY that can not be distinguished from my other gear that can also play CD's [oPPo 205 UCD]).
This does not mean that you need to get the highest price CD player, not even close.
Just stay away from the really cheap ones (say, ones that cost under $250 when they were new).
That is my opinion based on my own EMPIRICAL evidence. You MMV. But I'm sticking to what I know to be true for me.
 
EJ3 said:
o, they do not all sound the same (or even close to the same).
Click to expand...
They do if you connect digitally to an external DAC.


EJ3 said:
That is my opinion based on my own EMPIRICAL evidence.
Click to expand...
Was that evidence based on sighted listening by any chance?
 
Mine cost $20, built into a Shuttle SFF computer, copies bit perfect to FLAC, played by any DAC or media player I choose.

Even better, FLAC, in addition to being bit perfect, stores metadata, which I can edit. I can even add song lyrics, although this is a lot of work, and media players don’t display them.

But I can store thousands of CDs in the palm of my hand, make backups easily and cheaply, take them anywhere, play them on someone else’s TV.
 
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