There should be no difference if useing dedicated CD or Blue ray if connected by digital port, as it is then only a transport. All the difference comes from analogue outputs only.
After reading this i did a little test. sony cdp x303es cd player and sony bdp 380 blu ray payer amp nad c355bee connected with chord chameleon plus interconnects.
the x303es player wiped the floor with the the blu ray player, better everything.
so a £550 player from 1993 beat a brand new blu ray player which is why i have a system for my hifi and one for my surround sound.
i did compare the sony 303es to a nad c345bee cd player recently and there was nothing in it.
i would have kept the nad but it developed a track skipping fault so i returned it and never looked back
the x303es player wiped the floor with the the blu ray player, better everything.
so a £550 player from 1993 beat a brand new blu ray player which is why i have a system for my hifi and one for my surround sound.
i did compare the sony 303es to a nad c345bee cd player recently and there was nothing in it.
i would have kept the nad but it developed a track skipping fault so i returned it and never looked back
javelin said:
You are absolutely right - there should be no difference & the quality determined purely by the DAC used. There is a rather large "However" involved. The better the transport, the cleaner the binary stream will be. Time domain distortion of a binary stream is jitter - where the instantaneous position of the leading & trailing edges are spread out, causing the Bit Error Rate (BER) to rise. A good DAC will effectively "re-time" & buffer the digits before they enter the DAC chips. The more effective the re-timing & buffering is carried out, the lower the BER will be. The better the DAC (along with its ability to re-time) the greater the immunity to a poorer transport. There gets a point where re-timing the digital stream cannot replace missing bits.
A BR or DVD disc's data density is far higher than a CD's, so the transport has to be pretty good anyway. A decent DAC that can buffer a re-timed stream should faithfully reproduce music just as well.
The other advantage is one less box, unless you want boxes that only carries out a single function & lots of them! We will see the number of analogue inputs dropping & the number of digital inputs rising on future amplifiers. I'm all for fewer boxes, mains leads & interconnects! My ideal solution would be as fewer boxes as possible with modular design so if one part failed or a better part became available, it wouldn't render the whole obsolete.
Busb, that right, therefore some use direct digital link, such as Onkyo DV-SP506, some also jitter elimination, like DX-C390. But interesting is that many DVD or Blue ray devices had different review for sound performance over HDMI, but no really difference over optical or digital out, although, it should both serve the same.
Also in picture performance, if good upscaler is used, there should be no difference if video device is used as a transport only, but still the question is if source direct means the same as 576i setting.
Also in picture performance, if good upscaler is used, there should be no difference if video device is used as a transport only, but still the question is if source direct means the same as 576i setting.
With the amount of floor wiping going on, some of these CD players ought to be available in B&Q.
I imagine the difference isn't so great at all. I tried a Philips CD850, a 1989 machine against my SA7001-KI. Hardly any difference, the Marantz the better, but you wouldn't have been disappointed with the Philips. Likewise the Technics SLPG580, Linn Mimik, Kenwood DP7090...the differences aren't as great as the "night and days", "wiped the floors" suggest. I don't claim differences don't exist, rather the gap between one player and the other isn't as great in the majority of cases as is made out.
I imagine the difference isn't so great at all. I tried a Philips CD850, a 1989 machine against my SA7001-KI. Hardly any difference, the Marantz the better, but you wouldn't have been disappointed with the Philips. Likewise the Technics SLPG580, Linn Mimik, Kenwood DP7090...the differences aren't as great as the "night and days", "wiped the floors" suggest. I don't claim differences don't exist, rather the gap between one player and the other isn't as great in the majority of cases as is made out.
Well what have you got in a player:
The transport:
In a CD player it'll be dedicated to spin quietly and optimised for CD spin speeds.
Another type of player may not be (definitely aren't alot of the time).
The lense:
CD player lenses are designed specifically to track and focused to read CDs.
Other lenses aren't.
The electronics:
CD player electronics are designed for low power and low interference amongst its dedicated components.
Others won't do that as effectively as they are designed to have more components & more powerful processing components hence higher interference electronics inside.
The build:
CD player builds tend to be more solid.
Having said that the others market doesn't sound awful. The CD playing can stay mostly in the digital realm so the negatives of "the others" may not have as much real world effect as they could.
Along the lines of what record spot said. I quite like the CD playing ability of my sony blu ray but I wouldn't choose it for that either purpose.
Given the choice I couldn't class an "other" type of player as a good choice just an OK one. Like any audio system where you try to do more than one thing in one box. The system tends to lose the subtle emotions in the music even though they still can be capable and detailed, dynamic performers.
Dedicated keep it simple and seperate transport/dac/pre/power all the way to try to do the difficult task of keeping the emotional subtlety in the music.
The transport:
In a CD player it'll be dedicated to spin quietly and optimised for CD spin speeds.
Another type of player may not be (definitely aren't alot of the time).
The lense:
CD player lenses are designed specifically to track and focused to read CDs.
Other lenses aren't.
The electronics:
CD player electronics are designed for low power and low interference amongst its dedicated components.
Others won't do that as effectively as they are designed to have more components & more powerful processing components hence higher interference electronics inside.
The build:
CD player builds tend to be more solid.
Having said that the others market doesn't sound awful. The CD playing can stay mostly in the digital realm so the negatives of "the others" may not have as much real world effect as they could.
Along the lines of what record spot said. I quite like the CD playing ability of my sony blu ray but I wouldn't choose it for that either purpose.
Given the choice I couldn't class an "other" type of player as a good choice just an OK one. Like any audio system where you try to do more than one thing in one box. The system tends to lose the subtle emotions in the music even though they still can be capable and detailed, dynamic performers.
Dedicated keep it simple and seperate transport/dac/pre/power all the way to try to do the difficult task of keeping the emotional subtlety in the music.
Well what have you got in a player:
The transport:
In a CD player it'll be dedicated to spin quietly and optimised for CD spin speeds.
Another type of player may not be (definitely aren't alot of the time).
The lense:
CD player lenses are designed specifically to track and focused to read CDs.
Other lenses aren't.
The electronics:
CD player electronics are designed for low power and low interference amongst its dedicated components.
Others won't do that as effectively as they are designed to have more components & more powerful processing components hence higher interference electronics inside.
The build:
CD player builds tend to be more solid.
Having said that the others market doesn't sound awful. The CD playing can stay mostly in the digital realm so the negatives of "the others" may not have as much real world effect as they could.
Along the lines of what record spot said. I quite like the CD playing ability of my sony blu ray but I wouldn't choose it for that either purpose.
Given the choice I couldn't class an "other" type of player as a good choice just an OK one. Like any audio system where you try to do more than one thing in one box. The system tends to lose the subtle emotions in the music even though they still can be capable and detailed, dynamic performers.
Dedicated keep it simple and seperate transport/dac/pre/power all the way to try to do the difficult task of keeping the emotional subtlety in the music.
The transport:
In a CD player it'll be dedicated to spin quietly and optimised for CD spin speeds.
Another type of player may not be (definitely aren't alot of the time).
The lense:
CD player lenses are designed specifically to track and focused to read CDs.
Other lenses aren't.
The electronics:
CD player electronics are designed for low power and low interference amongst its dedicated components.
Others won't do that as effectively as they are designed to have more components & more powerful processing components hence higher interference electronics inside.
The build:
CD player builds tend to be more solid.
Having said that the others market doesn't sound awful. The CD playing can stay mostly in the digital realm so the negatives of "the others" may not have as much real world effect as they could.
Along the lines of what record spot said. I quite like the CD playing ability of my sony blu ray but I wouldn't choose it for that either purpose.
Given the choice I couldn't class an "other" type of player as a good choice just an OK one. Like any audio system where you try to do more than one thing in one box. The system tends to lose the subtle emotions in the music even though they still can be capable and detailed, dynamic performers.
Dedicated keep it simple and seperate transport/dac/pre/power all the way to try to do the difficult task of keeping the emotional subtlety in the music.
dannycanham said:
For all the talk about dedicated lenses, smarter error correction (hello Cyrus) and whatever else, it is easy for anyone that can be bothered to prove that it's all smoke and mirrors. Fortunately Internet is full of such people. Here is just one example that I found by a quick Google. This bloke proves that his old Toshiba DVD ROM, a Yamaha CDRW4416 CD-writer and an old quad-speed Toshiba 5302 CD-ROM all read the same track identically, down to the indvidual bit. He also plays the same track through an old Kenwood DP-3080 CD player, pipes the (optical) digital out into his PC soundcard digital-in, records the file and compares the result - again, identical down to the last bit. The only drive which didn't produce identical results was an old 12x SCSI drive he had picked up from a fair.
He also experiments with the effect of (digital) cables but I'll leave you to read that yourself. ;-)
I'm not saying there are no differences in CD-players, but I do maintain that
- CD transports are trivial by today's technology standards and certainly any DVD or Blu-ray player will be capable of reading a CD with 0 error rate
- the effects of jitter on the digital transport are greatly exaggerated
- the audible difference in sound quality (in those cases there is one) stems from subtle differences in the DAC implementation and the analog circuits around it
The rest is marketing.
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