Very good point, Mapman. I should add to my previous comments that my listening is 90% classical.
Best regards,
-- Al
Best regards,
-- Al
The CD player is dead.......
I am still waiting for someone to explain why a cd player is superior to storing music on a hard drive and going to a dac. Probably because you all know it's not.
Every cd player has a dac. I'll repeat that. Every cd player has a dac. So if you can store the ones and zeros on a hard drive and use error correction JUST ONCE and then go to a high end dac, isn't that better than relying on a cd player's "on the fly" jitter correction every time you play a song? Not to mention the convenience of having hundreds of albums at your fingertips via an itouch remote.
If cd player sales drop, then will cd sales drop as well, making less music available to rip to a hard drive?
Maybe, but there's the internet to give us all the selection we've been missing. Has anyone been in a Barnes and Noble or Borders lately? The music section has shown shrinkage worse than George Costanza! This is an obvious sign of things to come.....
People still embracing cd players are the "comb over" equivalent of bald men. They're trying to hold on to something that isn't there and they know will ultimately vanish one day.
I say sell your cd players and embrace the future of things to come. Don't do the digital "comb over".
Every cd player has a dac. I'll repeat that. Every cd player has a dac. So if you can store the ones and zeros on a hard drive and use error correction JUST ONCE and then go to a high end dac, isn't that better than relying on a cd player's "on the fly" jitter correction every time you play a song? Not to mention the convenience of having hundreds of albums at your fingertips via an itouch remote.
If cd player sales drop, then will cd sales drop as well, making less music available to rip to a hard drive?
Maybe, but there's the internet to give us all the selection we've been missing. Has anyone been in a Barnes and Noble or Borders lately? The music section has shown shrinkage worse than George Costanza! This is an obvious sign of things to come.....
People still embracing cd players are the "comb over" equivalent of bald men. They're trying to hold on to something that isn't there and they know will ultimately vanish one day.
I say sell your cd players and embrace the future of things to come. Don't do the digital "comb over".
Showing 6 responses by almarg
My main objective was to find out why people prefer cd players over a computer/dac combo.I'm surprised that as far as I can see no one has yet mentioned the jitter issues that can arise with interfaces between dacs and spdif or aes/ebu or usb outputs, but which do not arise with a competently designed one-box player. Certainly those issues can be and frequently are overcome, but not without some combination of luck; trial and error; careful selection of components, jitter rejection technology, cables, connector types, and even cable length; and in many cases added expense as well. Obviously there are many other factors which will result in a one-box approach not being the right solution for many people, but the jitter issue would certainly seem like something that should be a significant consideration in the tradeoffs. Regards, -- Al |
Devilboy: Going through the responses, I've noticed that the majority of you have not gone the hard drive route because you don't want to spend the TIME copying your music to a hard drive. That doesn't tell me WHY you think cd players are superior to hard drives. That tells me you are lazy.I too use a one-box cd player, and at this time I have no interest in computer-based music playback. That is perhaps ironic in my case, because I am heavily into computers (I build my own high-powered desktop computers, and I am a moderator on an internet forum for computer enthusiasts). I do not believe that either approach is superior or inferior; both are capable of providing excellent results if well implemented. And as Tvad seemed to imply, I don't see any point in ideological debates about the superiority of either approach. There is no one right answer that is universally applicable; it is a matter of individual needs, preferences, tastes, and interests. In my case my music collection is relatively small by Audiogon standards, and it is well organized, so the convenience factor of having everything on a computer wouldn't mean a whole lot to me. I enjoy, to a minor degree, having a collection of physical media, although I could certainly adapt to not having one. I have lots of cd's and lp's that are as yet unlistened to. And having made some major changes to my system in the recent past, re-listening to much of my collection on the improved system will keep me happily occupied for a considerable amount of time to come. Mainly because of that, I will have no interest in acquiring hi rez downloads for the foreseeable future. Given all of that, and along the lines of my earlier post, a nice side benefit of my present preference for a one-box player is that I don't have to concern myself with jitter issues. As for the inflammatory and unfounded allegation of laziness, I don't consider it worthy of a response. Regards, -- Al |
Are you saying cd players don't suffer from jitter just because they are cd players?A well designed cd player will have jitter issues that lie somewhere between minimal and none, because the relevant clocks are generated internally and are only transmitted internally, over very short distances. A two-box approach, whether the interface is usb, s/pdif, or aes/ebu, faces the fundamental issue that data is transmitted to the dac synchronously to a clock that is generated in the source component, not the dac. That creates huge opportunities for jitter to be introduced, due to impedance mismatches, cable issues, noise issues, clock recovery and synchronization issues, and a host of other possible ways for things to go wrong. Certainly those issues can be successfully overcome, but its nice to not have to worry about them, or to invest time and money in optimizing them. See for example this excellent Ayre white paper, for an overview of some of the complexities involved in adequately dealing with the jitter that can be introduced in a usb-to-dac interface: http://www.ayre.com/pdf/Ayre_USB_DAC_White_Paper.pdf Regards, -- Al |
Onetwothreego: A well designed dac will not have jitter issues either.I would put it that a dac that has extremely good jitter REJECTION capability will not have jitter issues. An example being the Benchmark dacs, which are pretty much immune to jitter that may be introduced by the source component or by the interface between the two components. However, not everyone likes their sound. Alternatively, if the design of the dac does not provide essentially complete rejection of jitter on the incoming signal (and most designs do not), then impedance matching, cable selection, cable length, the noise environment, the risetime and falltime of the output of the source component, the inherent jitter levels of the source component, and various other factors all become significant. None of those factors are relevant with a one-box cdp. Regards, -- Al |