OP- great news! Nice when that happens.
Looking for a CD Player
I am in the process of replacing my Moon CD 5 CD Player --- or might be no reason to replace my present CD Player. The next CD player if purchased is probably going to be my last as I am a senior in age. My wife and I are tired of getting up and down and up and down did I mention up and down to listen to the other side of an album. So, we have a number of CDs and frankly like the ease of listening to them. Not wanting to purchase streaming music. Therefore, we / I need an education on two subjects - Do we need to have a DAC incorporated in the CD player and secondly do we need to have SACD capability?? Not wanting to spend more than 3000.00. All the help would be appreciated.
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UPDATE: So i sent my EMOTIVA back - reason for the return - no gapless playback. With all the technology in today's world and the item lacks gapless playback. What was awesome was that EMOTIVA without hesitation sent me an RMA. AND fully understood. Awesome customer service. Also, in their return section they stated that shipping is to be paid by the customer for a return. They sent me an RMA with insurance and return shipping for less than I would have paid on my own. Again, great customer service. So, I do believe in Santa Claus. Merry Christmas to all on Audiogon - Ho Ho Ho..... |
@smerk I'm happy that you found what you needed to enjoy what you have. I'm kind of in the same boat in realizing what I actually need to be happy and wish I arrived at this moment some time ago. Have the happiest of holidays, you and your wife. All the best, |
After all the excellent information - I decided not to spend more money than I wanted to - I purchased an EMOTIVA CD Player, my system is nowhere near that of the majority of individuals on this site. But it works for me. As I get older, I spend less then I would have imagined finding reasons with rational why I really do not need this or that.
More importantly I enjoy giving my wife items that she really appreciates. Items that she never had growing up. The adage happy wife happy life in my terms is somewhat demeaning and giving her what she enjoys is what my life is all about - bringing happiness to her.
I’ve had an awesome life and what better way to enjoy my music knowing that she is happy at whatever I give her. That is me being an audiophile person. Enjoy the holidays make others happy and it will bring happiness to you more than a CD Player. To all that educated me I thank you. For all that answered my questions have a great holiday - best time to stop and think --- who could I bring a little joy to during these Holidays.
Smerk
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My wife loves Pandora. Music she likes and with enough variety of artists/songs you never know what the next track will be. I look at it like listening to your own radio station. With that said, something I was told years ago is "if you can't hear the difference then don;t waste your money". I too have hearing issues in my senior years and keep that in mind when looking for an equipment "upgrade". I purchased a used Marantz CD player for just a few hundie and could tell the difference between it and the Oppo I have for dvds but I doubt I could hear anything much better at a much higher price. Good thing smerk's address is unknown to us, with a menu like that you would have a bunch of adiophiles banging on the front door! |
Stick with your CDs that you love is my opinion. I've been down all the rabbit holes from tapes, vinyl and CD to streaming exclusively and I find that when streaming, I never get into an album, always jumping around from song to song and for me the sound of playing a CD via a transport into my DAC is much better than the same thing streamed though Roon or Spotify or Tidal. Streaming definitely has a place for me but for me it killed the joy of owning music and getting into a whole album. You can still buy almost everything that comes out on CD, everyone thinks it's dead but there will always be a place for it. Whoever said it's environmentally unfriendly LOL. |
jafant I presently own a Simaudio Moon CD .5. With bookshelf Triangle Speakers, through a Denon AVR. Might not need a new CD player - but I thought I had/have no clue as to what is this and that - so why not ask the gents on Audiogon. In college I was on the local town Radio Station as A Disc Jockey and played - Zepplin, King Crimson, Yes, CSNY, Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, Grand Funk, Humble Pie etc, etc. My wife is way younger than I so her taste is NIN, Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Beastie Boys, etc. I also was a big blues lover but in College hard to get blues Vinyl purchased by the Radio Station - Hooker, Old Yardbirds, Stevie Windwood, B B King, Muddy Waters, Johnny Guitar and the like. BUT I do have CDs of these great Blues Composers, OLD Canned Heat and others. So that is what I am spinnin on my CD player---- Now will the sound be better with a higher priced, newer CD player??? - that is what I am searching for in an education. To all have a Awesome Thanksgiving - my wife is cooking a Duck/Turkey legs, Chicken Breast, Ham, Chinese Sticky Rice, Green Beans, Chinese Broc witrh Oyster sauce - Might throw some Gator and Frog Legs in on the mix. Gotta love a Gourmet Cook with a double oven and a full over oven outdoor vent for the wok.... |
@cleeds OK, I'll be the first to admit I'm not an EE, or any other type of engineer. Thank you for responding. What I do know is when I was using a separate pre it showed 60% gain to have playback at 80 dB. Using the volume control on the McIntosh CDP it shows 40% to get the same 80 dB level. I mentioned that to a friend and he told me the higher voltage would cause that difference. |
That's not at all how an amplifier works. It will produce the same power for any given output level. |
To answer questions and to say one hell of an education. I spent 30 plus years working on the development of highly classified jets - I can tell you that with the electronics onboard the US can darken a city in seconds with the highly sophisticated electronics which would not only end streaming but a hell of a lot more damage. As a pilot I can tell you that the US can bring the darkness to a city. Worry about streaming - gone will be all communications so rest assured music would not be of a concern.... As for my system a basic two channel system - listening to B.B. King on a awesome CD but that could end with a ZAP of Electronic Warfare. I complain to my wife that my car's GPS system sucks from look ahead, to range, to North up to cursor driven maps - my wife's comment ----- this is not a multi-million dollar jet. But I have learned so much about transports, to DACs, to streaming that all I can say is THANK YOU for taking time out out of your day to provide an enormous amount of information that I will need to disseminate - BUT - that is what makes this forum invaluable. As for raising some individuals back hairs - all was meant as a different perspective on the subject matter. And that is what life is all about a different perspective... Smerk aka PrettyBoy
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Sounds as if your company uses CDs for software distribution or archiving? Sequestered carbon means the carbon is locked up, not that it can be recycled! You presented streaming as the eco-friendly alternative. I am suggesting this is a furphy (Aussie slang for an erroneous or improbable story that is claimed to be factual). At least, radio and TV are broadcast services (forgetting the internet versions!). The last service to stay up and running in a bad bushfire is public radio, provided you have a battery receiver. I was in Canberra when we lost several lives and 450 homes. The firestorm was fierce enough to create its own thunderstorms. The first thing occupying or revolutionary forces head for is the TV / radio station. The internet appears to be equally fragile. I have no issue with the internet as a medium for distributing files but strictly speaking, that is not streaming. |
Well, you can certainly make the choices you want to make. I consult for a company that produces digital media, both hard and soft, and over the past 15 years I’ve witnessed hundreds of palletes of returned CDs headed for the landfill, because nobody wants them. And that's just one very small company. Fortunately that practice is on the decline. And I could be wrong, but I don’t believe CDs count as "sequestered carbon," at least not at the moment. There are efforts to turn sequestered CO2 into plastics, but as far as I know no currently manufactured CDs are made that way. As for the internet, there’s another horse out of the barn. Might as well object to radio or TV. |
That's an interesting twist! Surely once the music has been recorded, silver disks just have a one time manufacturing and distribution cost. They are an excellent way of sequestering some carbon as polycarbonate, which is expected to last a hundred years or more. Streaming costs resources every time it is deployed. Cloud storage, routers, repeaters, cache storage, transmission lines, cables, wireless, satellites ... and that's before it even gets to you. It is a quirk of the Internet today that these things appear free to the end-user, apart from fixed access fees. At the birth of the internet, it was not clear how anybody would be able to make any money from it. Now less than a handful of US tech giants are hoovering colossal advertising revenues, which we all pay for. The internet uses a staggering amount of electricity, and it is growing exponentially. 40% is just for cooling data centers! Estimates of around 10 to 20% of global electricity demand next year will be for the internet. One of the most demanding internet loads is streaming. A CD contains 0.6 Gbytes of data, as much as tens of thousands of text messages. DVDs and SACDs are around 5-Gbytes. 4K Blu-ray is normally 50-Gbytes, about 100 times as much as a CD. That is why 4K video streams are dramatically compressed, and the best you can expect from most audio streaming services is CD quality. Streaming performs an unnatural act with the internet, because the internet chunks your data into packets and sends the individual packets over switched networks. There is no guarantee of arrival time. The internet can only reliably transmit data if data errors are detected and the offending packets re-transmitted. Streaming gives away error correction in the interest of timeliness, and drops entire packets if need be. We have recently seen that a routine security update knocked out much of the internet for days. In a war, the internet will be destroyed very quickly - no more streaming. |
Honestly, nothing you have said there undermines my point: CDs account for a fraction of music sales these days. They are environmentally harmful to manufacture and cannot be recycled. And what difference does it make WHO buys streaming music, or how they listen to it? Talk about a red herring! ;-) Let the "kids" buy whatever they want. My daughter loves Spotify. So what? In a single week I can access more high-quality, hi-resolution music suited to my tastes than I could afford to purchase on CD in an entire year. Plus I can share new discoveries with friends with a simple text message. This month alone a fellow jazz lover who lives 3,000 miles away introduced me to six artists I was unfamiliar with. I can check them out and enjoy them (or reject them) at no extra cost. I'm currently reading a biography of Charles Ives. I can listen to almost every piece referenced in the book in excellent sound quality without spending a cent on CDs. And if I find something I want to be sure I can preserve in my collection, I can BUY it and store it on a hard drive.
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@jayctoy Great!! Two other things I'll mention about streaming: 1) I've discovered artists on Qobuz who I would never have heard of otherwise, and who would not have a gotten a cent from me in CD sales; 2) Streaming is vastly less wasteful than CDs, which use fossil fuels and cannot be recycled. |
As of 2023, in England, CDs and vinyl accounted for 9.4% of music sales and year to year growth for CDs is at 5.4% ($127 million). In the EU, CDs account for over 10% of all sales with growth at 7.3% year over year. In the US, CD are a bit less than 3% with sales (but account for over 10% of revenues) and hover around 37 million per year since 2023 and 25% of consumers say they use CDs for listening. There's as many ways to skew stats as there are to skin cats. The tremendous number of streaming sales is mostly from youngsters and Gen Zers downloading pop music and are not audiophiles. People have to stop using that red herring to validate their position. They listen on cheap, branded IEMs and headphones that no self respecting audiophile would use, or just blast it out of their smart phones (as anyone who spends even a few moments in public can attest to). And yes, there are millions of pieces of music out there with streaming that no one is listening to. Availability does not equate to acceptability (clumsy, but I was going for something catchy). It's like saying one library is bigger than another to someone who could care less what's in the cooking and home improvement section. All the best,
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You don't need a "computer" to stream. Decent, small, self-contained streamers can be had for less than $500. It's a wonderful way to listen to an enormous variety of music for the price of a single CD every month. And anyway, the Black Ice unit I mentioned covers all the bases--a CD player, an excellent DAC, AND a high-quality streamer thrown in for good measure. The OP gets what he wants plus the opportunity to investigate a new format. As for artist compensation, well, that horse has left the barn. As of 2022, CDs accounted for less than 3% of music sales. If an elite classical label like Hyperion can finally hop on the streaming wagon, as they did last year, there must be a reason. |
@jayctoy ,he also said he's not computer or phone "savy" so all help is welcome...At our advanced age,it's hard for some not exposed to the tech to even comprehend how amazing streaming truly is..IMO spending good $ on a CD player is a WASTE! |
For those with working memories, it was not that long ago that I and others noted that we’re not that into streaming, don’t think it’s as good as CDs, artists not properly compensated, etc. and got lambasted for "butting in" on an "open conversation". Hey, that shoe does fit on the other foot. All the best, |
If you’re tired of getting up and down and up and down, I second or third the vote for streaming. The $3000 you might spend on a new CD player will buy you over 15 years of CD-quality streaming music. I have a nice CD player in a pretty darn good system but Qobuz easily matches or beats it. Plus you can expand a streaming service to any room in the house for very little money. I read a review of a new album, go to Qobuz and there it is, ready to listen to. If you want it all--CD, streamer, DAC--in one package, check out the Black Ice CD/Streamer/DAC. A friend bought one to symplify his system of separates, and he loves it. It’s also opened up the world of streaming to him. https://blackiceaudio.com/daccd-players/p/black-ice-fusion-wifi-dac-transport |
I took the SACD plunge a few years ago with the Maranzt SA10 (which I know is more than you said you wanted to spend) and I found that generally I love the sound of a good SACD more than I love the sound of the average red book. I have also found that as with red books, not all SACDs are created equal. But in general, to me with my player, I find the difference between red books and SACD is like drinking 2% low fat milk compared to drinking 1% or skim. (It's been a long long time since I've drank whole milk, so that's why I didn't use that in my analogy.) |
OP,I wanted to expound on what Pandora offers to you.. |
OP,I know you said your NOT interested in streaming BUT you are missing out on an entire UNIVERSE of music,known & new to you & your wife..If you have a computer,ALL YOU NEED to start is a FREE,Pandora account!You can even check it out through your Smart Phone! |
