CD players - Are they a dieing breed?

[stevebrock]

Vinyl is no step backwards. For me, it remains the king of formats.

Very much so!

It is my main source of listening, if I had the cash I would buy every single CD I have on vinyl - I do buy the odd new LP but mainly used LPs which on the whole have been superb!

Still surprised how good LPs sound on my Rega set up - never fails to bring a smile to my face!

BTW Vinyl is a Hi Res format!

 

[stevebrock]

Vinyl is no step backwards. For me, it remains the king of formats.

Very much so!

It is my main source of listening, if I had the cash I would buy every single CD I have on vinyl - I do buy the odd new LP but mainly used LPs which on the whole have been superb!

Still surprised how good LPs sound on my Rega set up - never fails to bring a smile to my face!

BTW Vinyl is a Hi Res format!

 

[MajorFubar]

BTW Vinyl is a Hi Res format!

Ugh! Don't go there! It starts the Digiphiles off on a rant about dynamic ranges and noise-floors lol.

 

[kmlav]

yeah , I'm on the look out for a linn Sondeck ... just love that reto style.

 

[stevebrock]

BTW Vinyl is a Hi Res format!

Ugh! Don't go there! It starts the Digiphiles off on a rant about dynamic ranges and noise-floors lol.

Surely Vinyl & Digital can co exist together in the same environment!

Both formats have the good & bad points but in terms of SQ vinyl is KING!

 

[manicm]

I thought that old 'FLAC sounds different to WAV' malarkey had been done to death. Any player which genuinely plays them differently has 'issues', and I'd change it. I really don't know why such nonsense persists in the HiFi community; it can only be because of a misunderstanding of how lossless compression works. EDIT: And before anyone says otherwise, this is not another case of WHF forum 'mob rule' shouting-down anyone who dares to speak-out against a consensus opinion, it's just a technical fact.

Major, yes this has been done to death, but while I don't dispute the actual rip as being bit-perfect, the fact that remains that lossless formats are still compressed and require decoding and that could affect results. It cannot be nonsense if major makers like Naim, Wadia, Cyrus and Linn themselves explicitly make their preferences known (Naim and Wadia->WAV, Cyrus->uncompressed FLAC, Linn-> FLAC generally).

One thing that the CA751BD is atrocious at is browsing through a USB stick - it's dead slow. And I can see that possibly impacting performance as well. It's the same with Arcam's drDock - they don't officially support the iPod Classic, because I expensively discovered myself, it was dead slow and the dock clearly relies on the iDevice for browsing speed. And the sound while great, decidedly sounded a bit slow.

And when it comes to certain posters here it is, to quote you, 'another case of WHF forum 'mob rule' shouting-down anyone who dares to speak-out against a consensus opinion'.

A bit-perfect rip is one thing, playback is quite another, and that applies to digital and analogue.

 

[stevebrock]

yeah , I'm on the look out for a linn Sondeck ... just love that reto style.

How about an RP6? Or is a Sondek what you desire?

 

[manicm]

Vinyl is no step backwards. For me, it remains the king of formats.

It could be, but then I haven't heard a modern deck with modern electronics. I do miss the tactility of vinyl though. Well 3 years ago, I returned a pair of speakers on home demo to a hifi dealer at his home. I expected to drop off and drive off, but he somehow kindly invited me in, made coffee, and he played Wish You Were Here on a really high-end system - he had an Audio Research amp, B&W 700(?) series speakers (the predecessors to the 800), but I suspect a mid-range REGA turntable. And to be honest I remember being non-plussed. But that could be down to anything, I don't know.

BTW, it may be down to blatant colouring/tuning on MA's part, but the RX1s sound warmer and more musical than anything! They make my system sound more vinyl than vinyl

 

[MajorFubar]

Major, yes this has been done to death, but while I don't dispute the actual rip as being bit-perfect, the fact that remains that lossless formats are still compressed and require decoding and that could affect results. It cannot be nonsense if major makers like Naim, Wadia, Cyrus and Linn themselves explicitly make their preferences known (Naim and Wadia->WAV, Cyrus->uncompressed FLAC, Linn-> FLAC generally).

So are you saying Cyrus are implying their streamers sound different depending on the level of FLAC compression? If they are, and they do sound different, then that's a technical fault which Cyrus need to fix.

 

[andyjm]

Vinyl is no step backwards. For me, it remains the king of formats.

Very much so!

It is my main source of listening, if I had the cash I would buy every single CD I have on vinyl - I do buy the odd new LP but mainly used LPs which on the whole have been superb!

Still surprised how good LPs sound on my Rega set up - never fails to bring a smile to my face!

BTW Vinyl is a Hi Res format!

Bad science alert.......

Apologies Steve if you are being ironic, but vinyl has a dynamic range of between 65 and 70dB. That's at best equivalent to 12bits.

Not high res where I come from.

 

[stevebrock]

Ok no worries!

 

[MajorFubar]

Bad science alert.......

Apologies Steve if you are being ironic, but vinyl has a dynamic range of between 65 and 70dB. That's at best equivalent to 12bits.

Not high res where I come from.

BTW Vinyl is a Hi Res format!

Ugh! Don't go there! It starts the Digiphiles off on a rant about dynamic ranges and noise-floors lol.

See? I warned you.

Oh and while we're on the subject of 'bad science', what the hell has the DR of a 12-bit digital source got to do with the potential SQ from vinyl? They're totally different and incomparable technologies.

 

[tomlinscote]

I am by my own admission no expert and therefore and quite willing to be corrected but my understanding of resolution is how well the output signal matches the analogue signal that was recorded in the studio (or live arena) and therefore surely as vinyl is an "exact" analogue copy it is high def, I though that dynamic range is the dB version of the difference between the loudest and quietest possible passages which will limit vinyl due to the mechanical nature of the pickup and therefore afffetc the sound quality but the copy on the vinyl is still an analogue of the original henvce high def. Or is it???????????????

Tommo

 

[Overdose]

Bad science alert.......

Apologies Steve if you are being ironic, but vinyl has a dynamic range of between 65 and 70dB. That's at best equivalent to 12bits.

Not high res where I come from.

BTW Vinyl is a Hi Res format!

Ugh! Don't go there! It starts the Digiphiles off on a rant about dynamic ranges and noise-floors lol.

See? I warned you.

Oh and while we're on the subject of 'bad science', what the hell has the DR of a 12-bit digital source got to do with the potential SQ from vinyl? They're totally different and incomparable technologies.

Hmmm. Some required reading here I think. 😉

 

[MajorFubar]

Yes you are correct Tommo, the waveforms on the vinyl are analogous (there's a clue) to the electrical signals on the tape. Though of course neither the tape itself nor vinyl are flawless mediums (?grammar) and both of them add distortion to the original waveform to an extent, in different ways to digital capture.

 

[MajorFubar]

Hmmm. Some required reading here I think. 😉

Ha! some absolute pearlers in there.

 

[andyjm]

Bad science alert.......

Apologies Steve if you are being ironic, but vinyl has a dynamic range of between 65 and 70dB. That's at best equivalent to 12bits.

Not high res where I come from.

BTW Vinyl is a Hi Res format!

Ugh! Don't go there! It starts the Digiphiles off on a rant about dynamic ranges and noise-floors lol.

See? I warned you.

Oh and while we're on the subject of 'bad science', what the hell has the DR of a 12-bit digital source got to do with the potential SQ from vinyl? They're totally different and incomparable technologies.

Hmmn. While the mechanism for perfoming the function is different, the aim of the device, the playback of stored music is exactly the same, and the parameters used to analyse performance are also the same. Tape is aonther medium where the storage process is the different, but the aim of the device is the same, and again the parameters used to measure performance are the same.

If you are not going to use dynamic range and frequency response to compare the 'ability' of the devices, what parameters did you have in mind?

 

[andyjm]

I am by my own admission no expert and therefore and quite willing to be corrected but my understanding of resolution is how well the output signal matches the analogue signal that was recorded in the studio (or live arena) and therefore surely as vinyl is an "exact" analogue copy it is high def, I though that dynamic range is the dB version of the difference between the loudest and quietest possible passages which will limit vinyl due to the mechanical nature of the pickup and therefore afffetc the sound quality but the copy on the vinyl is still an analogue of the original henvce high def. Or is it???????????????

Tommo

Err, no. Don't get me wrong, there are many people who prefer the sound of vinyl, but from a technical perspective it falls short of even redbook CD spec, and miles behind the theoretical spec of HiRes. There are pages of guff on the web about why that may be so, but it would seem that the distortions introduced by vinyl are less offensive than the distortions introduced by CDs - to be clear, neither approach is perfect. You will never hear the same original music on both CD and vinyl to compare either - the master is bent and stretched to compensate for the failings of vinyl before it is recored, and then bent and stretched after its played back - the same is true of CD . Perhaps this is what people like about vinyl?

Anyway, your post implies that vinyl has infinite resolution, which clearly it doesn't. The way engineering types consider resolution is to look at the smallest resolvable change in signal (for the sake of argument, the smallest sound detectable) then compare this with the loudest sound recordable. This ratio (as dB) is the quoted dynamic range.

Looking for a real world analogy, if your tape measure can measure millimeters, and is 10M long, then the dynamic range will be:

20 * log(10) 10,000 = 80dB

Not sure if that helps.

 

[lpv]

... it reminds me immortal pseudo-photography debate: film vs digital [ dynamic range, lost highlights and shadows, resolution etc] ... fact - film and digital capture are " totally different and incomparable technologies"

 

[andyjm]

... it reminds me immortal pseudo-photography debate: film vs digital [ dynamic range, lost highlights and shadows, resolution etc] ... fact - film and digital capture are " totally different and incomparable technologies"

I am not sure about your facts.

There is a general assumption on websites like this that just because the poster doesn't understand a technical point, then no one does. This gets reinforced by other posters who have a similar view - and before you know it, it is accepted fact. Engineers active in the field generally don't bother to post on sites like this, they are too busy earning a living. As a result, a very warped view of reality is developed, unfortunately helped by commericial interests with an axe to grind.

Of course CDs and vinyl are comparable - they are supposed to do the same thing aren't they? I was at a well known national broadcaster just as CDs were being introduced for broadcast use. What do you think we did? Sat on our hands and said 'good heavens, this is incomparable to vinyl, there is no point testing or measuring it'?

The same is true of film. Grain size, distribution and levels of sensitivity are directly comparable to pixel depth and resolution in digital. At the same national broadcaster, I was fortunate enough to work on a wetgate telecine transfer machine. Film to TV transfer - an incomparable technology? So we didn't bother making any measurements or do any analysis?

 

[chebby]

"CD players - are they a dieing breed?"

Not yet. Probably not for a long time yet. If LP turntables are anything to go by, there will be good ones around from loads of manufacturers, at different price bands, for decades to come.

Less choice than ten years ago and less than now, but still plenty to choose from. (Just like the choice we still have in turntables.)

 

[MajorFubar]

If you are not going to use dynamic range and frequency response to compare the 'ability' of the devices, what parameters did you have in mind?

I kind of listen to what it sounds like. The sound-card in my old Windows laptop has a greater DR and FR than my ears, but my ears tell me it still sounds rubbish. You really can't tell what something sounds like by looking just at its DR and and FR, because beyond a cetain threshold it's irrelevant.

A 12-bit source probably has a better DR and FR than some studio master tapes from the 50s and early 60s (pre Dolby A) , but it's likely they still sound a billion-times better.

And no, vinyl and CDs are not comparable technologies. They produce an audio output which can be compared, but the technologies are incomparable. If you don't believe me try putting a CD on a turntable and see what it sounds like. Bit quiet and scratchy I bet.

 

[relocated]

"CD players - are they a dieing breed?"

Not yet. Probably not for a long time yet. If LP turntables are anything to go by, there will be good ones around from loads of manufacturers, at different price bands, for decades to come.

Less choice than ten years ago and less than now, but still plenty to choose from. (Just like the choice we still have in turntables.)

There will undoubtedly be cd spinners, but how many of them will be 'cd players'? I rather suspect that more and more cd spinners will be BD machines adopted by the masses and that 'cd players' will become a specialist area as turntables tend to be now.

Until 'the Rich World' gets mega fast broadband then there will be a strong need for optical media. Third World UK [so far as broadband is concerned] is still a long long way from being able to be entertained by downloads, particularly movies. My wife downloaded an HD copy[all legal] of The Hobbit yesterday. A 10gb file that took @ 7 hours to download. A ridiculous amount of time and for many people would use up the whole of their monthly allowance. The digital age may be thriving in some areas but far too many people have no hope yet of going download.

 

[BigH]

Yes tend agree why buy just a cd player when you can buy a Blu-ray player that can play cds, sacds and dvds and do other functions as well or a PS.

 

[manicm]

Agreed, no sense in spending a 1000 quid on a CD player, when your top flight Marantz's, Oppos et al will do the job and then some, plus play movies gloriously.

As far as vinyl goes, I sorely miss the covers and playback, but do not miss the inconvenience, maintenance etc. But one day I would want to get a good deck, if only to play some records we have that have never been released on CD.