Ruminations On CD Players

I gave up on CD players.  Library got too complicated.

So, FLAC form a PC.  I can then use a very good DAC. I am not aware of any CD player for any price with a DAC that can beat some I know of for $100, let alone a RME, CORD, Denifritz etc. 

CD transports are inherently SYNCHRONOUS, so you are stuck with the transports clock.  If it was good enough, fine. You lose all the issues of not well implemented USB and PCM outputs.  Big IF.  

My best CD player was the old "last" tray style Rotel. Internal DAC was garbage compared to today but excellent in the day.  I used at that time a SOA Wolfson.  Now, a PC, JRiver or MusicBee into a JDS Atom+ blew it away plus I can find my music, drag half a dozen CDs to the play list and walk away. 

Several in the high end stores. Did not pay attention to the brand but hooked up to very high end systems. One was a Moon, Another a Mac. 

What you may be missing is how good a select number of inexpensive DACs really are.  My dirt cheap Atom+ is much smoother than any DAC I have tested in my desk system under the price of a Aries.*  It is the only one that tames the sibilance of a Joni Mitchel, Judy Collins, or brass edginess of Harry James.  I have heard multi-thousand dollar CD players in the stores that did not. I have heard multi-thousand dollar DACs that did not.  Now, what is critical to everyone is not the same. You may ignore what irritates me and vise-versa.

Can you adjust in your high end transport  gain in the digital domain to prevent filter overshoot? Does it do it it's self for you? Can you match your filters to emphasize detail for headphones vs speakers?   I do not believe any you listed do. 

As both a music lover and an engineer, I know the transport is basically irrelevant. Any $20 disk player is as close to perfect as it gets to read a disk without error.  The sound is all about the DAC, mostly the reconstruction and analog stage.  It was not always true. Back in the day we did not have decent buffers and clocks so going back to the Phillips POOGE days, there were real improvements to be made.

Now, it is my experience the only improvement  is to the prestige CD player bank account.  Of course placebo and ego are totally relevant and I don't dismiss or criticize for that.  If it makes you feel better, then well you feel better and that is great. Enjoyment is the bottom line. If $15,000 worth of billet aluminum and slick advertising makes your music better for you, by all means.  Someday I may hear something that changes my mind.  Here in N.C., we don't have too many opportunities.  Just went through Richmond, DC, and Baltimore with little progress. 

I would be far more impressed if someone like CORD slapped a decent DAC into a $200 transport.  Use real engineering rather than advertising. 

*My next possible upgrade is to compare the Aries, Qutest, RME and maybe a Geselli to see if they can surpass my lowly JDS. Nothing SMSL, Topping, Schiit, or IFI has so far for the specific issue I hear. Amazon probably hates me. Is there a higher level? Does Dave sound better?  Not that I can hear and I have heard a Qutest vs Dave in a store. But I am not 30 any more either and I only listen to speakers, not headphones. 

Ironic.  I find ASR useful and informative as I do have an engineering background, designed and modeled in Spice amplifiers, crossovers, and preamps. But most of us understand specs as currently understood are not the last word. I'll take a Hegel over a Benchmark amp any day. The irony is, I was tossed off ASR because I believed ( know) I could hear the difference between DACs and amplifiers. My wife can do with more precision than I. 

I suggested load variances as one factor effecting sound. I also mentioned dynamic compression in tweeters. Both quite real, measurable, but not in Amir's playbook. Harder to measure is the effect on IPS and VAS from bass transients with poor board layout or insufficient dynamic current. Again very real. I can even model it. I found by testing, tweeter breakup causing IM making upper midrange edgy. Again, Amir does not believe this so he banned me.  Not exactly scientific in my book, but it is his site. 

I only have about 500 CDs on my server.  Hitting Goodwill every week to grab any 69 cent one that looks' even mildly good.  I have not gone streaming yet as it takes too much effort.  I am an old guy and do not live with a phone attached to my hand and don't own a tablet.  Eventually.  Soooo much great music out there.  And Sooo much garbage to wade through. I wish I had any assurance that streamed files were at least CD quality.  From what I have heard and read, a lot are just old garbage up-sampled. I gather Qobuz is about the best. I have Prime, but found it to be a mess and did not have half of what I went looking for.

I compared some "HD" streamed files with the same music in RedBook and did not hear any difference,. Always a "but" and in this case, it was not showing the specific edginess that bothers me.  Nora Jones does not hit those notes. She is always smoooooth.  

So, I RIP with JRiver.  Play over USB to my DAC. WASAPI Exclusive, asynchronous. Testing buffer sizes, testing if -3 dB is best. May test ASIO as well but I don't see the advantage. Looking into host based oversampling, normalizing, and any other possible off-line processing to feed the DACs. Or, just a DAC like the RME or Cord that has the power internally.  My PC DVD transport, about $15, reads the disks 100% error free at about 5X. There is nothing else a transport need do.  Any jitter, noise, rise time issues are completely lost when the file is saved to disk.  Just physics.  We now have USB interfaces that don't mess up the signal, even in CH-FI. The DAC chips are all fantastic, which leaves the reconstruction (including clean power) as what effects the sound. Good and bad. 

Folks, 

Please re-read my comments again and you will see my current viewpoint IS based on listening. Yes, behind that, I do understand the technology and along with measurements are ONE side of the information, but it is the music that counts and that is always first. Set aside the convince factor of playing a disk vs dragging several disks to a queue. That does not have any bearing on sound. 

When what is suggested stretches from the unknowns about our hearing and our inadequacy of measurements to flat out impossible in this universe, then yea, my understanding of science pops up it's head.  Maybe a little broader understanding of how the transports actually work would help.   

 In the land of only sound, once you have the bits in a buffer, it is the reconstruction that makes all the difference. All of it. How stable the transport is becomes irrelevant.  What is super is we can then spend our money on that part that does matter: DAC, AMP, Speakers. Even the analog cables if you must as real effects that do not violate the laws of physics exist. At least when I RIP a CD, any re-read is taken care of so playback will never have a skip. Well never is if I set the buffer correctly in the player as Windows is too stupid to pay attention to run level like True64 was. Maybe we can then talk about the really confusing and unknowns with the dozens of digital filtering algorithms, how to deal with filter overshoot,  different up sampling, different dithering, and how those effect the DAC with respect to everyone's  preferences in sound.  All of these things can effect the sound. Some more than others and it differs person to person.  I looked at the WEBs of the fore mentioned transports, and surprise! no discussion of this at all. 

 Granted, how well controls work matters. One thing I loved about my old Rotel is how snappy it was to controls.  Push "Open" and it opened. Did not have to think about it. Powered up without taking forever to boot Java. Hit play, and no screen saying "reading disk". It played. I miss my OPPO DVD as when I upgraded to 4K I had to buy a Panasonic. Dog slow. 

If these mega buck transports are actually streaming real time from the disk so the stability and micro-vibrations they claim are important effect the accuracy or timing, well IMHO, they were obsolete both in engineering and in sound 30 years ago. If your DAC is so obsolete as to require the input timing to be precise, well it too is obsolete. Sorry. My $109 JDS DAC is better than that and it is far from SOA.  A CD transport is not a turntable and those mechanical factors that are critical just do not happen in a transport. 

There is a lot we don't understand about sound reproduction. But there is a lot we do. I have found a degree in electronics to be helpful to point me to where there could be real sonic differences so I can afford real improvements, not that I have not been fooled in the past. We are all human.

I express my experience and understanding so others can think and make rational decisions based on their own hearing and still be within this universe laws. Not "Madison ave. engineering"  For the international audience, that is the headquarters in NY for advertising. Home of very slippery squamata as they are well oiled. Your money of course.