sebrof

Anytime Cornman, and if I'm ever "down south" I'll be sure to give you a heads up.

Wow! We are on two different sites! ...and my signature line? I have to have something to listen to the music with, Right? I can't understand how someone dosen't think it's about the music, for me?!?! Have you looked at the RTM thread, in the last few YEARS? Dennie OK, so I looked at the RTM thread again and there are lots of posts since Sunday. I think my browser loads what's in the cache or something because on some pages I need to hit refresh. Quick calculation shows over 50 posts / day...about music. Dennie - I clicked on your name and clicked find posts by - Probably 99 / 100 of your posts are in the RTM thread. [+o(] < --- That's the "Ick" smiley, but it's the closest thing I could find to a "Eating Crow" smiley. If you need me I'll be in the RTM thread reading about music

Yeah, I'm not saying that music isn't discussed, and I realize that for all of us it's a mix of music and gear. But my comment that got bolded and disagreed with was " The actual music is mentioned on this site a very small percentage of the time." I Know about the "Right This Minute" thread, but that hasn't been posted to since Sunday and it's now Thursday. Dennie - Your sig isn't "Give Me Jazz or Give Me Death" or "I Love Heavy Metal Drummers" You got 17 pieces of gear listed on your sig. I'm just sayin'

I completely disagree! Funny how we can see the same "site" from two different perspectives. I came to this "site" because of the gear and I stay because of the focus on music! Dennie He's just reading the worng threads, Dennie. If it wasn't about the music, we wouldn't need no stinkin' speakers! Bruce Thank Goodness Bruce! Maybe we can get Sebrof to share some of his "favorite Music" and he may see this "site" differently! Dennie I'd love to share my recent music purchases, although music is rarely discussed on this site. See below the list of current topics in 2-channel, not one thread is primarily about music that I could tell. Maybe you guys could point me to where you're talking about music?? I just got 2 Kenny Burrell records (Jazz Guitarist): For Duke, which is a 1-record excerpt from his 2-record "Ellington Lives Forever" and also "God Bless The Child" which has a real spooky cover (Vietnam copter). Great stuff, I was not a KB fan until one of my audiophile buddies played one of his records a while back. Dawes, Deer Tick, Middle Brother - My 18-year old son turned me on the these bands. Good stuff, kinda alt rock type thing. All LPs except Middle Brother, Dawes was a 2-record 45rpm set brand new for $17 at the local record store. Can't beat that. Herb Alpert and Hugh Masekala - An unlikely combo, jazz horns. Hugh's African influence heard throughout. Al Kooper I stand Alone - Classic record, only I don't really like it. Has his version of "One" (You know, "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever know..."). Why vinyl? New Jubs on the Block Look at what I found on c-list... KPT-904 vs Jubilee with same top thoughts JBL Tweeter Array Set-Up Three and a half walls using Belles. Streaming music. PC? Sonos? Squeezebox? RF-7 ll GONE vintage Jensen and/or Pilot Need some advice on equipment. KG 3.5 Speakers and HK 430 Twin Powered Receiver Sanders Electrostatics? Flooded Domo Sherwood S-5000 integrated tube amplifier. Marantz 8b Question about adding a powered subwoofer Epic CF 4 Dumb K-horn Center Channel Question Frazier Users Group aka F.U.G. DIY Guys-Speaker Restoration Tip Needed NOS TOTL Japanese cheese??? Quicksilver Horn Monos My jubilee setup Gave my Cornwalls away Some help on building a Khorn copy. Tube Amp Advice: 2A3 or 300B or??? Best 300B to go with Belle? any suggestion? My first tube receiver - the Pioneer SX-800 Dealers say Klipsch Suck

I agree. I think there are a lot of audiophiles who refer to themselves as music lovers because of the negative connotation associated with audiophile. I'm an audiophile and I have audiophile friends. We get together to check it each other's systems. We talk about gear for about 15 minutes and play music and talk about the music, artists and their careers, who played with whom and when, covers of songs, that stuff for the next 4 hours. The gear quickly becomes what it is - Something to play music on and nothing else. If I had a nickel for every audiophile who called themself a music lover I'd be a rich man. This site is about gear. The actual music is mentioned on this site a very small percentage of the time. There are sites that focus on music. This ain't one them.

Actually I think the main reason the current generation has embraced MP3 is because they can copy (us old farts call it stealing) music with little effort. I think the reason is because it's more convenient and almost nobody give a rat's behind about sound. You go from a walkman with 1 CD or a much smaller mp3 player with hundreds of CDs. The world didn't transition from tubes to transistors, or from records to CDs to mp3s because it sounded better. Whether they do sound better is another topic, but it wasn't because of sound that the transitions were made.

At the time, I had at my disposal (and was sorting through it as well) Peach preamp (still my primary preamp), McIntosh preamp (forget model, I didn't use it at all), and an Artimes Lab preamp http://www.artemislabs.com/LA-1-vacuum-tube-preamp.html Quad II tube amps, Viva 300B SET amp, some solid state amps. Speakers were the Jubilee's. Music is primarily 70's type and many DVD concerts. I also have some classical stuff (Thanks Larry! ) Any rumor you hear about Marie Osmond is probably a lie. What did I hear? What didn't I hear? This would now be maybe 4 years ago so I'm hard pressed for details... I'd just say that to the degree I tried to swap between CD players, (plumbed into same preamp, I only had to change selector and perhaps content) I simply didn't find enough of a difference to warrant keeping the more expensive Esoteric. Perhaps my "testing method" was flawed.... tis ok by me. My ears don't miss it and the wallet appreciates the value that I received for it. I look at it as a win/win with the person who bought it from me and myself. I'll say this... it had a LOVELY remote control with a wonder quality feel about it (machined from a piece of aluminum I think?) I also now appreciate that it had balanced type outputs. I'd like to get a preamp with balanced outputs and having one with CD balanced inputs would have made it interesting.The entire unit did not have the lighter weight feel that the Sony in fact has.... still.... when I hit 'play' I found that I just kept thinking where's the differences that justify this kind of price disparity? Answer for me was Ebay on the Esoteric. Now that's what I call a recap...Thanks![Y]

Coyotee - Some details might give your experience some context. What's the rest of your system, music played, what differences you did hear (might not be woth the $$ to you but might be to sopmeone else). That type of stuff is often useful.

Here I'll disagree. A CD player has a rather straightforward job: take the digital representation of an analog waveform and convert it to voltage. The accuracy (or lack thereof) of that process is readily measured. Fair enough, we will disagree. But to (someone's??) question, do the players sound the same I say not because they measured differently. From the Wrap-up: "From analog audio standpoint...The BDP-93 displayed benchmark performance while the BDP-95 exceeded that mark to the point where we were measuring the limits of our $40k Audio Precision HDMI analyzer." And, "For those utilizing HDMI outputs only, get the BDP-93. In our opinion, analogue buffs won't be able to find a better value than the BDP-95 both as a Blu-ray player and a dedicated CD player." Considering they use different DACs and different circuitry, I'm not surprised.

They did not; of course, conducting a blind, level matched listening test (needed to cut through biases, and to eliminate the effect that even a 0.2dB difference in volume can have) is rather time consuming. Yes, unfortunately that's usually the situation. It's difficult to get to the truth. I don't think sitting the 2 players on the rack and saying "OK, here's the expensive one" and "OK, here's the cheap one" is a good way to get the truth. But neither is measuring because IMO something like music together with how our brains finagle things is far too complex to simply measure what we think we need to measure in 2011. So I'll stick to my original, "Why they would sound different is beacuse they are different. Why would they sound the same?"

Frankly, the all the measurements run by Audioholics indicate that what differences exist are purely academic. If you've got the cash burning a hole in your pocket, sure the 95 has bragging rights. But that $500 could go to much better uses such as room treatments, more CDs, etc. Did they listen to them? I'd try to listen to them. It's rare to have an apples to apples measurement comparison when looking for components, so I haven't paid much attention to measurements. I'd be real curious as to how close the CDPs I've compared over the years measured. But without knowing the measurements, then comparing the sound of the players, there really is no baseline to tell how useful measurements are. IOW - If the players I've compared measured the same, I'd be inclined to say measurements are not very useful because they sounded different. If they measured differently and there was a correlation to the measurements to the sound, then I'd be inclined to say measurements are useful.

The problem I have with this statement is that in the next breath you go on to say how you can make a bit perfect rip of a CD with the CD drive of a computer. I myself made some lossless rips this morning (with error correction), a process that took a couple minutes per CD, on a drive that cost ~$20. If this el cheapo drive can read a bit perfect copy at ~20x (could potentially be faster if I had something more powerful than your average $300 netbook), why do we need a high end player to read a bit perfect copy at 1x??? I'm half guessing here (hopefully not completely guessing), but the computer can error correct when it's reading the disc until it gets it right. When the Transport is reading it's playing in closer to real time, and the more error correction the more the sound is likely to be affected. So for a transport it's more critical to get it right the first time.

Aside from the price of the two units, do you have any objective data/measurements that would indicate why they would sound significantly different? The measurements given at Audioholics show "benchmark performance" for even the less costly Oppo. What are they missing? I don't have anything, I've never even seen one. Why they would sound different is beacuse they are different. Why would they sound the same?

If they use different DACs I'd be surprised if there is no audible difference. You say you doubt anyone could hear a difference, and that there is no way you could. What is this based on? Have you compared different players with the same, different DACs? I'm just surprised anyone would say that about 2 different players. As far as $500 worth of difference - That depends completely on the person with or without the $500.

The first time I compared CDPs was probably 15 - 20 years ago. I really thought they all probably sounded the same, or at least real close. Didn't think I'd be able to tell. I compared (blind, my wife was swapping the disc) a NAD C 520 and an Arcam Alpha 7. At first it took me a couple of minutes to hear the difference. After a few times, I could walk in the door and tell which was playing even before I sat in the chair. So I believe that once we hear the difference side by side the difference can become "huge." And that was between 2 fairly comparable players. FWIW - The Arcam sounded much better. Regarding CDP vs. DAC, a DAC is probably the smart thing to do, but I know I'll be spinning records and CDs for a long long time. This is one part of my life where it's OK to not be smart.