2. digital
  3. 167453-1647

Vinyl guy seeking recommendation for a top level cd player

I know cds are dead.  Best time to buy a cd player, the way it looks.  I want an all in one box.  I don't stream so a separate DAC is not required.  Most of my cd collection have been ripped to a PC as Flac files and then down loaded to a Sony HAP-Z1ES.  Currently about 3000 Redbook and perhaps 100 SACDs.  The way cds are being dumped I figure on becoming a buyer again so these numbers will go up.  I have looked at Marantz SA10, Esoteric K1 (lightly used), and Luxman D-10X, so far.  It would be good if the sound could approach vinyl.  The Z1 does up to a point.  Listening this morning to the same recordings, the Z1 compares to a high end MM cartridge, but not to a SoundSmith Experion.  Maybe I am asking too much, but in any event a new cd player is being sought.  Thanks in advance for any advice.
Bill
billstevenson

Showing 2 responses by pengun

pengun
79 posts
 
Just rip your CDs to an NVMe drive. They play much better from one really. A DVD/Blueray burner is incredibly good at this kind of thing and is about $40 these days.
pengun
79 posts
 
All CD players are kinda crap at digital. The best possible source for a digital file is a RAM Disk. Its not hard to see why, as its absolutely effortless from your RAM.
I have actually tested this extensively, and an NVMe drive is pretty close to a RAM Disk, with SSDs just behind and HDs behind them. I don't have good CD players to test but regular ones are not as good as any HD that I have heard. CD players just throw the bits, as they read them, at their DAC, or out to your DAC, while digital files have header, so the system knows what's happening.

 Come on kids, I'm nearly 75 and have been tweaking my systems since the 80s of the last century. Computer noise can be pretty well eliminated by using a Pi bridge of some kind, and the Pi2AES hat is so good at this, the signal my DAC sees is very clean indeed, with almost imperceptible levels of both noise and jitter.
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