Which CD Player has the best sound quality?

I’m hoping Luxman might be amongst those with the best sound quality - because I’m getting a D-06u to replace my problematic Yamaha (which sounds fantastic, btw, but has been plagued w/ issues).

 

It would no doubt have a quieter transport.Be more reliable.Be far better made.And will be a lovely piece of art to show off in your listening room.
Will its sound better? No guarantee.

That's one of the few things i wish i could change about CD.With a Turntable set-up the better the build quality and craftsmanship the more likely it is to sound great.With CD reproduction a cheap plastic portable CD from the 90's can sound as good as a superbly engineered 10K unit built like a battleship.

 

Totally disagree with this. On a decent system the differences can be painfully obvious: The first time I sent my Yamaha in for repairs I used an old Anthem CD-1 for backup. It sounded thin and the soundstage was a diffuse mess. Recently I’ve been using my Oppo 203 as a substitute and while it sounds good, it lacks the musicality and realism of the Yamaha - instruments sound like digital approximations of instruments and not the real thing.

 

That's crap!

 

I would think that the top of the line Esoteric or dCS would have "the best sound quality," but you could buy a top of the line Mercedes or better for the price!

 

Its not!

Best CD sound ever. Panasonic SL-S120 and Sony D25 portables*

 

I have a cheap 1988 Philips CD-380 (TDA-1543)..None of the expensive CD players i've owned have sounded as good as this plastic box.

 

Yeah, it is.

 

If only these cheap players had a Tube Dac?

 

There are loads of cheap tube DACs. Not sure why you’d want one

 

I was being ironic because the previous poster is a Tube fan.

 

Many moons ago I had a Jolida JD100, no op amps with a tube output. Stock it was ok, but not reference. For S&G I modified the hell out of it, way over the top. It was considerably better, but still wasn't up to reference level.

 

You’re trolling. One of the worst cd players in creation (I had one).

 

Pics?

 

Interesting, your experience and mine are so different. Different ears; different DACs no doubt. My ripped disks played through a laptop sound better to me than the original played through an Oppo 105, in each case going to a separate DAC with the Oppo going to spdif and with with two femto-clocks on its USB to I2S board for the playback of the files.

Well, I said I was not going there. But since you provoke me I'll go only so far as to suggest that pure DSD64 can outperform Redbook. By "pure" DSD I mean a DSD (or SACD) recording that has not first passed through as a PCM file. There are very few of these, except those derived from analog tapes, usually old ones. Such recordings sound VERY good to my analog loving ears.

 

Steve’s got a point here. Reread the opening post. It’s too naive to be real.

 

I'd like to think my first response left him speechless, which was my intent.

 

Don’t make me laugh

 

Those aren’t bad, but don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

 

Mine too

 

Thanks to the few who threw a few good names i had never heard of out there. I was interested in knowing if there were some CD players that were known to have good sound quality. Lots of paranoid argumentative stuff. Weird. Seems like a pretty straightforward question really.

Sound is subjective as so many stated. But i thought i could get an idea of a few decent players maybe?

I have a Yamaha that i like a lot. When i bought it the store said it had a good quality converter so it would be better than ones i had owned and to my ears he was right. I like it much better sound wise than ones i've owned before. Features and the layout are so so to me. My old cheap ones seemed easier and had a better layout. Now i kind of have a few others to check out when this one checks out. Thanks to the people who gave me a few new ones to peruse.

 

I bought a few used inexpensive portables after this thread first was posted. Although not without some deficiencies, I did find them to be spacious sounding and sparse/light sounding. In a good way. More stripped down of a sound. More elemental. More...pure.