What Sonically is the Difference between a $1,500 CD Player and a $10K-$25K One?

Uh, they can’t hear?

If they’re my mods look out! 👀 Everything’s relative. A. Einstein

Possible scam sighting 🛸

An anti-shill is as good as a shill. Keep up the good work! 

As long as it stays in the background. Like yourself, perhaps. 

The trouble is you don’t go away. On the positive side it’s nice to have followers/stalkers. 🤗

Good point! I made the same point five days ago. I call it the Hierarchy of Sound.

All CD players regardless of price are subject to the deleterious effects of vibration and background stray laser light. Therefore, one would be better off buying an inexpensive player and fixing those problems than simply investing beaucoup bucks on a player. There are obviously many other related issues such as interconnects, power cord, fuse, external DAC, etc.

No matter how much you have in the end you would have had even more if you had started off with more in the beginning. - old audiophile axiom

A rich audiophile has about as much chance of entering Audio Nirvana as a camel 🐪 has of passing through the eye 👁 of a needle. - old audiophile axiom

Exactly! You catch on quick! 

All CD players throughout history have been plagued by fatal problems. While it may be true that some advances have been made in CD playback nobody has solved the problems of scattered laser light, seismic vibration, and the various vibrations produced by both the CD player and the CD itself. If you don’t mind the missing information, the crappy bass performance and the compressed sound, more power to you. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, “What missing information, crappy bass performance and compressed sound? My system sounds fabulous!” 🤗

Glubson, and I mean no disrespect, you don’t seem to know anything. Am I being too harsh? 

One assumes between now and August 24 the day of the ten DAC blind test the DACs under test will be breaking in along with all the cabling. Or is that too much to ask?

Glubson, apparently I know more than you do. Mystery Solved! 🤗 I don’t mean that in any derogatory way. 

I pretty much stopped reading when I came to, “For the record, I have been in the audio industry from (sic) fifty years as of this September and have a lot of experience and...”

For, the record, I said my Sony Walkman sounded better than a (stock) high end player. 

One assumes you must have blind tested them, yes?

Who sez I’m not?

machina dynamica
we do artificial atoms right!

My $5 Sony Walkman CD player outperforms any $10,000 CD player. You just have to know what you’re doing, that’s all. It’s not rocket science. 🚀 🤗

You don’t have to be too swift 🏃‍♂️to chase electrons since they barely move at all. 🐌

On the Kalahari you don’t have to be the swiftest wildebeest, you just have to be swifter than the slowest wildebeest. 🐆 

elizabeth7,397 posts07-16-2019 7:27pmAnalog sucks/analog is great, digital sucks/digital is great.Well MY digital is great, and so is my analog. Doesn’t anyone else get really tired of all the whining about SOMEBODY ELSE’S STUFF?If you want to say "My attempts at xxx have uniformly sucked". Fine. Please do not then decide for everyone else theirs has to suck too. And even worse, that they must be deluded since they can't hear it sucking. 

>>>>You probably shouldn’t take it quite so personally. Well, maybe you should, how would I know? 😳

roxy542,793 posts07-16-2019 7:18pm

geoffkait,

I actually enjoy reading posts like yours. It is true of course that digital was pretty terrible for the first number of years, but now that I have been living with a competent transport and non-oversampling DAC for years, I enjoy the great sound (perfect...? NO) and grin at all of the outdated criticisms of digital's deficiencies.

>>>Many audiophiles think their system sounds fabulous. As long as you’re happy I’m happy 😃 

A quick recap of the last 40 years

1. First CD players 1983, really crappy sound.
2. Second generation CD players, still really crappy sound. Maybe it’s the CDs.
3. Increase but rate. Still crappy sound.
4. Increase the bit rate some more. Nope, still crappy sound.
5. How about outboard DACs? Still crappy sound.
6. Upsampling, nope. 
7. OK, how about higher bit rates AND higher sampling rates? Nope. 
8. Now all the CDs are super compressed so who cares?

All CD players regardless of price are subject to the deleterious effects of vibration and background stray laser light. Therefore, one would be better off buying an inexpensive player and fixing those problems than simply investing beaucoup bucks on a player. There are obviously many other related issues such as interconnects, power cord, fuse, external DAC, etc.

No matter how much you have in the end you would have had even more if you had started off with more in the beginning. - old audiophile axiom