The noise in the average room is usually more than enough to make that true.
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MQA Update
- Thread starter Steve H
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MarkHH
Member
Perhaps not - but they were pretty much universally perfect enough for human hearing. See some of the tests of vintage players carried out by @NTTY.
EDIT - EXAMPLE
Marantz CD-80 Review (CD Player)
Hello Everyone, This is a review and detailed measurements of the Marantz CD Player and Transport. Marantz CD-80 - Presentation This an old qualitative CD Player from 1989, and clone of the Philips CD-80. It was relatively expensive and its weight of 15kg (33lbs) was a statement alone. It...
www.audiosciencereview.com
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I've said this several times on here, and I'll repeat: vinyl has 12bit equivalent dynamic resolution at best, under laboratory conditions. 12bit sampling instruments already sound great to our ears. Because the latter are way more limited than our technical equipment.
Infact early CD player converters and their imperfections are pretty much solely responsible for the long-standing myth and claim that "digital sounds harsh and unpleasant". It was somewhat true in a very short time window. But after that... oh boy. The rise of affordable, super high quality sigma-delta converters in the mid and late 90s made that claim a bad joke, both literally and figuratively.
Today, oldschool sampling instruments like E-Mu ESI and 4000/5000 series "Ultra" samplers from the late 90s, and similar models, are sought after for their pleasant, "warm" sound! While all they had was simply good AD and DA converters from Burr-Brown, plus proper algorithms making the best of the technical and computational limits of the time. But there's seriously a good number of enthusiasts who praise what essentially amounts to... "digital warmth".
My brain:
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The very first CD players were less responsible of the harsh sound than the bad mastering of the time (with some albums). First release of the famous Oscar Peterson Trio - We Get Requests was outrageously distorted.
qirex
Member
A lot of the audiophile conventional wisdom about digital audio is from 40-year-old magazine reviews. Additionally, people had never heard playback that clean before
Other people want that crispy edge, you can't get an SP-1200 for under four grand nowadays. That said musicians on average might even exceed audio nerds for Gear Acquisition Syndrome
danadam
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Those 14-bit DACs also used oversampling, so the effect on the noise floor would be less than that.
I have that, I'll have to see if it is the original. Certainly it sounds good.
Having revisited early CD players and having many original CD issues I have to say I think the stories surrounding their bad sound are myths. There might be the odd few duffers I'll accept that.
There's measurements for the Sony CDP 1 out there somewhere. It has no audible issues at least within reason.
danadam
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Any time I read something like that, I put on Brothers In Arms, Nightfly, Back In Black, Tricycle, Aerial Boundaries or Oxygen IV, turn the volume up (because with those albums I can) and wish that more of such "lifeless" music was produced today.
My first CD player was great (must have lucked out: Magnavox/Philips) My second one (SONY) was not.