is there a current production 20 bit cd player ?

The only way to get 20 bit resolution out of 16 bit data is by oversampling. And why avoid 24/192?

Speaking of 20 Bit CD players/
The best ever 20 bit CD player is the Denon DCD-3520.

Hong Kong Hi-Fi Review the Stereophile of Asia did a recent study on the best players in the last 20 years. And the Denon DCD-3520 was the best out of over 200 CD players above $1000 in the last 20 years. Transport mechanism, construction, laser quality, sound quality/accuracy and other tangibles took into account of this study.

The Denon DCD-3520 player listed for $1500 when it was new in 1989. And now fetches over $2000-$3000 depending condition on the preowned market. Who would of thought a CD player could double in value and that is 17 years old...

The troll strikes again!! He doesn't want 24 bits because then it might sound too good!! Actually Eldartford is right, redbook cd maxes out at 16 bits in reality, anything else is upsampling and marketing.

It's not current production, but an excellent 20-bit player was the Denon DCD-1650AR, released in 2001, MSRP $1,800. I've owned two and still have one. While it's no longer my reference player, it's a very fine one, very well made, built like the proverbial battleship, weight 26 pounds 4 ounces! You can pick up a used one at a very reasonable price. (It does have 8X oversampling.)

hi jond:

lets have a brief discusssion of what good sound is.

good sound is anything anyone says it is. it is a matter of opinion, even if it doesn't agree with yours.

if you like 24 bits and upsampling because of transparency, detail, neutrality or what ever adjective you choose and i find that i prefer non upsampling and two tubes in the analog stage, it is just that, taste.

i don't see that as justifying a derogatory remark.

if you don't believe me that doesn't mean i am insincere, misrepresenting or a liar.

i'm sorry if you are so offended. maybe you should drink some of the bordeaux wine you sell and relax.

thank you tvad.

i just found another which i am going to investigate.

it is the granite audio 657 with tube output stage.

thanks again for not putting me in the troll club.

for thos who may be interested, my system consists of the following:

quad 63s, vtl deluxe 120 mono amps, a maple tree 66sn7 based preamp from Canada, an Audionote CD2 cd player.

my cable is a hodgepodge consisting of legenburg by capativa, dcca audio and sunny cable technology model 600 cable.

i am looking for a backup cd player to my audionote which a like, as it has age 5751 black plate.

yes i am a bit fussy, but i have a good idea of what i like.

again, thanks for not giving up on me and tell your budies to look at this post to see that i have a hopefully credible audio system.

oh yes, i forgot an important accessory, the EAT cool tube dampers for my 12 volt tubes. it's aluminum and looks like a heat sink and has teflon inserts. really works well. ican't remember the web site but if you do a google search, i think you can find it. iheard these tube dampers at the 2006 CES.

NAD C-521BEE is 20-bit machine also.

Can anyone tell me what a 20 bit D/A does when presented with 16 bit data?

With oversampling a 16 bit D/A can output discrete levels corresponding to a 20 Bit D/A. That must be what is going on.

In any D/A the least significant bit, and sometimes two, usually toggles randomly from a one to a zero. If you use a 20 or 24 bit D/A to process 16 bit data, at least you can be sure that bit 16 is out of the noise level. For example, you could zero out bits 17-24, and essentially have a noise free 16 bit converter.

Oversampling came into the audio field with the first Phillips CD players. They used a superior quality 14 bit D/A with 4X oversampling whereas Sony used a true 16 bit converter that was less than perfect. The Phillips players sounded much better than the Sonys, but the part that really makes me chuckle is that Phillips, who was in partnership with Sony on the CD development, never bothered to tell Sony what they were doing until it was too late for Sony to react.

Maybe I'm off base here, but why go to 20 bit instead of sticking to Redbook. In fact, if you like Audio Note, why not one of their non-os DACs. You can use your CD2 as a transport, or get another transport. Just thought I'd throw it out there.

Eldartford (and anyone else who wants to respond): You wrote above: "Oversampling came into the audio field with the first Phillips CD players. They used a superior quality 14 bit D/A with 4X oversampling whereas Sony used a true 16 bit converter that was less than perfect. The Phillips players sounded much better than the Sonys, but the part that really makes me chuckle is that Phillips, who was in partnership with Sony on the CD development, never bothered to tell Sony what they were doing until it was too late for Sony to react."

You may well know more about this than I do, but it's my understanding that most of the development work on redbook CD was done by Philips, that it's really basically a Philips development, and that Philips only brought Sony in late in the game because of a conviction that a major Japanese player needed to be brought in to assure world-wide marketing success of CD. (That would also account for what you describe above.) What is your understanding?

Another mystery to me is that I frequently hear audiophiles (especially the vinyl crowd) say that early digital was awful but that it's gotten a lot better in recent years. I don't question that today's best digital is better than ever (or can be, in the right hands). But I've been collecing CDs for more than 20 years now; I climbed aboard the digital train early on, and now have a CD collection (mostly classical) of well over 2,000 CDs. And one of the peculiar things I notice is that some of my reference CDs are still "early digital," that is, recorded 1980-1983. (A good example would be recording engineer John Dunkerley's Decca/London CD of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, with Dutoit and the Montreal SO, recorded in 1980.) Some other "early digital" CDs are, of course, not good at all. Which leads me to conclude empirically that the quality of the sound in earlier digital recordings has more to do with (a) the skill of the recording engineer, (b) the quality of his equipment, and (c) the recording venue than with the presumed inadequacy of all early digital recording. I've got some classical CDs recorded 1980-1983 that have superb sound. What do you think?

Texasdave...

I always thought that Sony had a more or less equal part in CD development, but you may be right about that. I vividly remember driving over to Albany NY having already decided to buy my first CD player, a Sony, and then being astonished at how much better a Mission player sounded. That player was based on the oversampling 14 bit Phillips player, and I used it for almost two decades until it finally quit working. The sound was good right up to the day it died.

The "vinyl crowd" are not bothered by what others see as faults of LP technology, and react with criticism of the alternative, CDs and digital recording in general. (A bit like politics today). Digital recording came before CDs. Many LPs were digitally recorded. Even the early professional digital recording equipment was capable of performance better than the LP and CD media avaliable to the consumer. Also remember that analog microphones are involved when a digital recording is made, and the variation of sound between different microphones is huge compared with any slight difference between analog and digital recorders. Variation of sonic quality is, as you suggest, entirely a matter of the skill of the recording and mixing engineers. This is still true with today's SACD and DVDA.

Sometimes the early versions of recording technology are better than what follows. The very first stereo LP issued was an Audio Fidelity recording of the Dukes of Dixieland. I don't have that LP, but I have a subsequent Dukes recording that came out about a month later. It is well worn, but it has perhaps be best stereo effect of any LP that I own. Also, early Vanguard stereo recordings were made using only two microphones, and they also sound great. After a while the recording companies found that it was necessary to blend LF into mono (horizontal groove modulation) and do compression and peak limiting so that their records could be played on ordinary (non audiophile) equipment. Multitrack recording became the norm, and mixing down to two channels sometimes led to aweful results. Sonic quality deteriorated.