Best CD player?

[sebrof]

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.

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]

[MikeFord]

I do still buy a CD from time to time, but mostly I listen to online sources in one format or another that are free. I routinely find things of interest to me that aren't available by any normal practical means. Last night I listened to a DVDA of Carly Simon that is long out of print.

[CECAA850]

I do still buy a CD from time to time, but mostly I listen to online sources in one format or another that are free. I routinely find things of interest to me that aren't available by any normal practical means. Last night I listened to a DVDA of Carly Simon that is long out of print.

Where online do you get your music?

[T.H.E. Droid]

I'm still a big fan of Floyd, Zeppelin, and the Who, and I have dozens of their albums on CD, right next to my 2 channel system...so why would I be better off loading them all on to my computer and playing them from there?

The CD has less information on it than vinyl due to the processing capability of chips when the CD was first created.

An extremely simplistic comparison is a stair case.

Draw a diagonal line up the incline of the stairs and assume that represents the actual sound wave.

The vinyl will store the wave as the diagonal line.

The CD will store is as a sequence of stepped measurements and when replayed it looks like a set of stairs.

When the CD player is reading the disk in real time and cannot re-read the bit covered by a finger print, as it can't stop the music by saying "hang on a minute can you repeat that again please I missed that bit", so it replays a previously read bit from it's buffer and the hope is that you won't notice this.

When you rip it to your computer, there is NO SUCH PRESSURE TO PERFORM so it will re-read it a few times before it spits the dummy and gives up.

Your CD player will make up it's own version of the jumping record when it gets a bit much "under pressure". haha

The previous request was for something in the order of $500.00

The ARCAMrDAC will be in that price range and is very effective in getting the best out of the USB port on any computer. Nothing else to buy if you have sufficient space on your computer hard drive.

Wolfson chips are also used by Cambridge and Rega.

My ARCAMrDAC is magnificent and extremely portable so I take it to gigs and link it to my MSi X340 netbook.

Since CD's are inferior storage mediums to vinyl then this combination gives me the best from a CD as the computer has "no pressure" to get the information of the CD in real time.

It's a shame to have to read these long pseudo-technical explanations from someone:

1. who has an obvious agenda

2. who doesn't know how CD systems actually work

3. who can repeat the technical jargon but doesn't know how things like interpolation and how oversampling works.

[psg]

It's a shame to have to read these long pseudo-technical explanations from someone:

1. who has an obvious agenda

2. who doesn't know how CD systems actually work

3. who can repeat the technical jargon but doesn't know how things like interpolation and how oversampling works.

Yeah, but it was left in the noise and never got any grip. Stephen was quick to point out the mistakes.

when replayed it looks like a set of stairs... Funny stuff.