Does a high end CD player provide better sound than a lossless rip?

Hah, this is the problem with these types of hobbies. Sometimes I wish I could just sit down and listen to something without overthinking it

 

Respectfully, this is just wrong. Humans are not sensitive to timing errors at the level of picoseconds; modern digital playback systems effectively deal with jitter and timing issues; and while timing issues can get introduced in the digital filtering process, those timing errors are dwarfed by the massive timing errors in 99.999% of speakers, where even time-aligned driver arrays can't begin to match the timing precision of digital data.

 

I presume you read all five pages of the article i quoted before concluding it was wrong.? Because it lays out in fine detail why he disagrees with your assumptions on Jitter and Timing errors.

 

I've read it, and I've read hundreds of posts and many linked articles at the Computer Audiophile forums, where I hope this particular kind of topic continues to find its main home, rather than here.

 

Like the previous poster who questioned whether you all make things too hard, when I read these type of threads it cements my thinking that I will never go down the all-digital rabbit hole. I simply want the ease of loading in a disc and hitting play. There are too many variables once things go all-file and hard drivs, too much tweaking to do that I sense will over power the act of simply listening to music.

Around six weeks ago I bought the Lector CDP 6.0T tube CD player that was offered here in the forum classifieds. It sounds amazing, I will not be seeking another upgrade for CD play. Prior to the arrival of the Lector I was using a Rega Apollo running out to a Schiit Bitfrost Uber. I was very happy with the sound and was contemplating making the multibit upgrade Schiit offers. But the Lector showed up here, and a $2200 Italian tube CD player for $500 sounded like a lot more fun than the $250 Schiit upgrade. Definitely one of the best audio decisions I ever made.

Happy listening to all, however you choose to do it!

 

Yeah man, when I get home I want to be as far away from a computer as possible. Jacking with computers is my day job.

 

^This. Definitely this.

CDs & LPs are sexy and fun. Computers & data files? Erm...not so much.

 

Exactly! I want to FLIP through my records and CDs, not SCROLL through album covers on a screen.

 

I just prefer the tactile experience of fingers on a quality glass touchscreen. Triggering the ocular implant is so cold and impersonal.

 

A flash high end tube-staged CDP is damn sexy and damn fun and amazing sounding too.

 

I think you can do a lot better than the DAC that you are using, so a high end disc player has an excellent chance of sounding better. You could probably get a CD player with USB in and stream your files through it and play discs.

 

I hear you on this, and I definitely enjoy just putting in a disc and spinning it.

However, I enjoy my computer-based music setup just as much. I stream it through my Oppo BDP-105, which also is my disc spinner, so I have the same DAC for both discs and computer audio, and I can use the same Oppo remote for controlling disc playback and some of the computer/USB playback functions. For me, that's the secret: to go from discs to computer audio, all I have to do is press the input selector on the Oppo remote. If I had a separate DAC and separate amplifier input for computer-based audio vs disc audio, I would find it much less convenient, and I'd probably drive myself nuts wondering which DAC would make which particular album sound better.

I also will say that the culture of digital tweaking you refer to does not exist primarily because computer-based audio needs a lot of tweaking to sound as good as (or better than) a CD-player based system. It exists simply because people can do it. A CD player is a closed system: disc transport, DAC, analogue stage, power supply, and all connections except for the power cord and RCA cables are internal. No one worried about this stuff until they went to computer-based digital, when all of a sudden you could pick a power supply, have an outboard DAC, supply your own digital interconnect (and choose among USB, toslink, coax, AES, or HDMI at that!), and so on. No one outside the marginal green Sharpie devotees gave a fig about the spinning CD/SACD/DVD-A disc - but all of a sudden with computers people are comparing sound quality with different brands and models of hard drives, comparing sound of spinning drives vs SSDs, and debating the sonic qualities of internal drives vs external, and external USB vs Firewire vs Thunderbolt.

I try to keep an open mind and not to mock others, but I have to say, the "rabbit hole," as you describe it, does contain a good bit of madness. It's not that all this stuff makes absolutely zero difference. It's that there's little to no evidence that most of it makes a difference that's consistently audible. To the extent most of this stuff makes any difference, it's on a scale that is just overwhelmed by the sonic flaws/characteristics of the room and the speakers (or of the headphones). In fact, most of these alleged differences are swamped just by the influence of confirmation bias and humans' well-documented inability to remember the fine details of sound from one minute to the next when doing comparisons.

 

Dont forget one of these(which i still have)

 

What the heck is that spoon for?

 

"Due to brain leakage and other influences".

 

and it has laser beams and built like a tank... so yes

 

Hold on, this is a real product? I'm guessing it is total BS and does nothing, but still funny nonetheless. I wonder how many bought it thinking it did something.

 

Can't argue with laser beams! Oh, and the sides are "piano black", so there's that too.

 

Bonus points for using the word "tarnations"!

 

The difference is that with solid state, you can set it to generate a stable external clock. With the spinning disc, you are grabbing the clock out of the data which is less stable. So goes the hypothesis-this I have never heard a demo of, now THAT would be interesting for someone local to set up!

 

The best way I can explain this, is from the first time I heard a lossless flac rip on a top end streamer.

A friend owned a very good Linn active system, with a number of their top end Klimax products in it, he had the latest spec Linn Klimax CD12 and the recently introduced Linn Klimax DS.

I was shocked by how much more I preferred the DS. Seeing that at the time a number of magazines had the Linn CD12 as their reference player, it was clearly outperformed by the lossless rip. Back then, Linn believed they had developed the CD12 as far as they could, and later stopped manufacturing CD players.

If they were to make a CD player now, I certainly believe it would be a big improvement over the last version of the CD12 - but the latest DS is also vastly better.

A CD player is a noisy, hostile environment compared to a streamer, so ultimately I believe that a CD player will not be as good, especially fed an AccurateRip uncompressed file, unless massive (and sadly expensive) measures are taken to suppress the noise of a CD drive.

With a scratched disc, things only get worse for the CD player, but with the advantage of multiple pass ripping with software such as EAC and dBpoweramp, it further tips the balance towards lossless rips.

Obviously there are many top end CD players that outperform many streamers and vice versa.

There are a number of budget CD players and streamers that sound very good, but I believe at this level, the balance swings even further towards the ripped file. Any error correction, and on most CDs there is probably some going on, is not a good thing, but obviously better than muting, bangs and skipping.

 

I enjoy the listening experience ritual of being physically engaged with CDs & LPs & TTs & CDPs. Reducing music to just 0's and 1's is blasphemy and f&%king BORING. Get off the couch. Plus: My mighty Klipsch speakers will kick the stuffing out of your wimpy book shelf computer speakers. Computer nerds and proper Audiophiles will always remain distant cousins in my world.
End of. Lols.

 

I'm with you. This can be as easy or as complicated as you wish to make it. Ultimately the choice of how far you wish to disappear down the rabbit-hole is up to you.

 

I'm with you on the physical engagement with vinyl and used to read all the sleeves and scan the dead wax for hidden messages and the best cuts. This has probably contributed to me nit being able to read a single thing from the majority of CD sleeves.

The fact that I have some 50 year old LP sleeves in better condition than some five week old digipacks does little to endear me to the CD, and apart from a few signed discs, I really have no connection to them.

I rip and listen, but still tend to listen to an album in its entirety.

I'm rather pleased that a LP sleeve seems to have more longevity than a modern CD case, which fall apart far too easily.

I have a fairly good CD player, a Linn Unidisk, but apart from using it for DVD-A and SACDs, nearly always listen to my CD's 0s and 1s, via a rip, and certainly not computer speakers - though my Monitor Audio computer speakers, aren't that awful!

 

I dunno! I have a Denon DCD-3000, A Denon DCD-1510, a Luxman D-105U and a Harman Kardon HD7500 as my CD players. They all sound great to me!