Cheap CD player sounds good

nope, CD lacks hypersonic information which empirical research shows light up more of the brain's pleasure centres
try reading OOHASHI,et al 2000 in journal of The American Physiological Society

 

Watch out with comments like that around here....Many vinyl plastic heads are gonna implode and the vinyl plasticky icky icky police will be after ya

 

Pretty controversial study. Has anyone ever been able to repeat those results?

 

Many companies put non-functional steel sheets in their equipment to make it heavier. Now, there may be a good reason, like keeping the interconnects from pulling it off a desk, but it does add to the perception of quality. Not necessarily the case, unless you’re talking tube gear, where better transformers will be heavier.

 

I can normally buy a bottle of wine along with the CD for the price of the vinyl record; sometimes even a rather fine Nikka whisky. I know what works my pleasure centres*



*Drink responsibly.

 

a new vinyl record costs about the same as a good Habano in the uk

 

This is what drew me away from my ripped files. A CD and a glass of red. As I said before I like to listen to the songs in the order the artist issued them. I can do that with ripped files but the CD or vinyl seems more organic. Putting a CD into a CD player, rather than into a laptop, also seems more organic. I realize that this is all very subjective. I realize that feeding the output of a CD into a DAC and then into a 1960-ish tube amp is a contradiction.

 

Playing music files sitting on a NAS drive through an app on my tablet feels extremely organic to me.....I am not sure if anything else could ever feel as 'organic' to me.

 

I'm willing to bet that your speakers also lack ultrasonic information. Very few speakers have anything going on above 20 kHz.

 

Lenny’s Klipsch speakers go up to 25k. Entry level for ultrasonics. What is interesting about this study is that it admits these ultra sonics are inaudible; they are experienced somehow through the body and not the ears. Headphones don’t provide the same effect even if they go above 20khz. Also the ultra sonics in their own don’t provide the effect they need the lower audible frequencies as a carrier to work. Crazy stuff.

 

Used to have a Sony discman - MEGA BASS... sounded wonderful.

I loved that CD player and it lasted 25 years!!! All things must pass.

 

There is a time and place for everything. Some value the sense of disconnection physical media playback brings. Leave the phone upstairs and just play albums in an old school way (or even older school via LP).

 

Of course they do! I am a believer of the “bits is bits” theory. When it comes to digital sound, as long as your DAC can perceive the difference between a 1 and a 0, there will be no noticeable difference in sound quality between one CD player and another. The only parts that can introduce interference are the analog components of your player, and if you payed a honest amount of money for a good machine, there should be no problems.

 

So much misguided nonsense in this thread.
If you think a cheap CD player sounds just as good as an expensive one:
a. You’ve never heard an expensive player
b. You don’t have a system capable of hearing the difference
c. You don’t have the ears to tell the difference
d. All of the above

 

It's actually the high-end "audiophile" CD players which are more likely to color the sound and deviate from a true high-fidelity representation of what's on the disc than a cheap (but competent) player, because many of them have an explicitly stated agenda to make CDs "sound more analog".

Carver started doing that back in the '80s with their "Digital Time Lens". It claimed to eliminate the "harsh, brittle wasteland" of digital recordings by altering the frequency response to the "octave-to-octave balance originally intended by the musician" (Really? Did Bob interview all of them?), boosting the stereo difference and adding a slight amount of delay to the soundstage. And DBX had some CD players with "Digital Audio Impact Recovery" which could either expand overly compressed recordings or compress overly dynamic recordings.

 

INDEED!

 

You've nicely compiled the usual audiophile excuses together. IMO, that's the "misguided nonsense" which has been promoted for ages without actual testing. And as far as I can tell, anyone who does try controlled listening ends up recognizing that differences are minor (like the difference between 16/44.1 and hi-res audio).

Now, go listen to a few reasonable inexpensive CD players like the Yamaha CD-S303 compared to something >$1000, controlled for volume and no peeking at the face plate on whatever high end system you think will show a difference. Be mindful of exotic players using tubes which may color the sound; some listeners might like this of course.

Have a good look at the Oohashi article, there are some unusual bits in the methodology. Never been replicated as far as I can tell other than reports by the same group. Discussed here.

 

Mmm, not quite convinced by that. Sounds nicely on the fringes of the kind of audio woo woo that peeks its head round the door of our hobby every now and then. I'm sure the conclusions make for interesting reading, but practice demonstrates readily that on the basis of the two lines above, I'm likely giving this topic more regard than it's probably due.

 

Has anybody else called "House" yet???

 

Please tell me, what makes digital PCM playback better on an expensive CD player?

 

Better analog section, better power supply, better clock, more than likely equals better playback.

 

If you need to ask you probably don’t really want to know.

 

A question I have is this: let's say you have a dedicated CD player, would the DAC in dedicated CD player only go to 16 / 44.1 and in a DVD player to 24 / 48? Where would the specs be on a Blu Ray player? Would they only go to 24 / 96 or do they reach higher. I'm talking about bare minimums here.

 

Not unless it's really old. Oversampling 18-bit DACs were already becoming common by the late '80s, and 1-bit DACs became nearly universal in the early '90s. The solution ended up being to process the audio 1 bit at a time really quickly, rather than do everything in 16-bit (or greater) chunks.

 

I had a Carver CD player with a "Digital Time Lens". It was a button. If you pushed it, it sounded a little different. If you pushed it again, it sounded a little the same. I think in some far-flung reach of the Universe, there was a complete upheaval in space-time whenever I pushed the button.
But I cannot confirm that.