My CD player's specs

Bob,

I think the key phrase in the article is "in a correctly designed CD playback system ". Many are not correctly designed and have excessive jitter, often caused by poor layout as much as poor design (e.g.stray capacitance of circuit traces, noisy oscillator power supplies).

Once one adds a separate DAC things get even worse with very poor SPDIF transmit/receive designs.

So I agree that in a correctly designed player, which need not cost more than $500, jitter should not be an issue. In practise though I think it often is.

I know one of the project engineers that worked on the new Rega Apollo decoder chipset. The Rega is universally praised as one of the best CD players under $1000. In his opinion the reason it is so good is because the decoder delivers a very low jitter very well defined eye pattern, and the DAC is presented with a very stable clock.

Now I'm thinking about it I just might take my CDP to my local store and do a comparison there.

I have a Sony 5 Disc carousel CDP, 10 years old,and when I do A/B comparisons between my two CPs there is very little difference.

My speakers are very good, well I think they are, they are Kef 104/2 and Kef 105/3.

The power amp is a Luxman as well so I'm torn as to whether or not I should upgrade my amp or CDP first.

Specs look ok except the dynamic range seems a little low.

There are only 16 bits of information on the disc. Using convertors with greater is only done to increase DAC linearity. Contrary to Bob's assertions I believe jitter is extremely important, and swamps distortions in the analog output. Bob ... try fitting a low jitter oscillator to a budget CDP like a Marantz CD67 if you don't believe me.

I think Tvad is correct that specs are meaningless and the best you can do is to listen to some newer CDPs. If you buy a used CDP from audiogon and resell it if it doesn't outperform the luxman it will cost you very little.