Henry, I had a similar dilema not long ago. My wife buys mostly new, well recorded CDs. I buy mostly 70s, poorly recorded CDs. And we have alot of average sounding CDs as well. The new stuff sounded bright, the average stuff was listenable and the old stuff sounded like Charlie Brown's mother speaking over the telephone. I called my audio advisor and explained the problem and his immediate response was,"you need better speaker cables". I thought that was completely counter intuitive but since he never steared me wrong before, I auditioned about seven different pairs. In the end, he was right. EVERYTHING now sounds better than before. Replacing the power cord later brought marked improvements but not as great as the speaker cables. Matt........
Best player for Poorly Recorded redbook CDs?
There is lot on the cutting edge of digital players, Meitner, APL, Esoteric, Zanden, Reimyo, and the list goes on. Most have great reviews and their own followers. The problem is we usually test this with better recorded CDs or do not actually consciously think about how well a player plays poorly recorded CDs. If I have a main player for SACDs and avg-well recorded CDs, is there a player out there that somehow makes poorly recorded CDs sound better, and better than other equipment? Note this only pertains to poorly recorded CDs...and its not about being truthful/accuracy per se...all I want is something that will improve on bad CDs. Meitner is OK at this but I wonder if other players out there (and indeed it may well be a budget player,...who knows) that specifcally do this well. Given as music lovers, we generally own our fair share of poor sounding but great music CDs, I think this is potentially quite important and can pay lots of dividends after some investigation....at least that is the hope. Now thinking about this, its also somewhat surprising that professional reviewers do not really address this aspect much. Hmmm.
Any suggestions? Do you agree with this line of thiniking?
Any suggestions? Do you agree with this line of thiniking?