Blacksabbath25 said:
expat_mike said:
At a risk of sounding like TrevC, all the CD transports inside decent CD players should extract the same musical data from a particular disc, and any differences in sound will be due to the differences in internal DAC implementations, interacting with jitter, power line noise, RF noise, etc.......
Rather than blow a huge amount of money on another CD player, why not experiment feeding the optical from your existing CD player, to a Chord DAC like the 2Qute or Hugo, and then into your existing power amp.
If you find that this produces the sound that you are searching for, then you will potentially saved several thousands of pounds/yen, which you can use for upgrading other parts of your system (similar ethos to the Major). At least it should be cheap to borrow a DAC, and audition it, before spending a lot of time/money chasing CD player perfection.
I am at a stage were I am pretty sure I need to buy a better CD player or buy a very good dac but which road do you go down as I am not bothered by streaming or anything like that . If I brought a top dac it would be just for cd playback that's all or do I buy a top cdplayer that's made for the purpose and would this cdplayer still have a good dac inside without blowing silly money ?
If you opt for the one box solution of an expensive CD, you are putting all your eggs in one basket, and trying to find CD player which contains both a good transport and an excellent DAC. I know you stated in your initial thread, that you are searching for a one box solution, but I do think that you might find it useful (and more flexible) to explore the two box option of a relatively cheap CD player (maybe your existing CD player) feeding an external DAC. This also means that each time you audition a new option, you are only assessing if changing just one element (the DAC) improves the sound. Every time you audition a new CD player, you are assessing if two elements (the transport plus the DAC) yields an improvement.
You could start at the relatively cheap (compared to some of the CD players that have been mentioned in this thread) level of a Chord 2Qute
http://www.head-fi.org/t/749582/chord-electronics-2qute-dac-announced and work your way up in price. There are certainly a lot of people falling over themselves at the sound of the Chord DAVE
http://www.head-fi.org/t/766517/chord-electronics-dave but at that price, you are making even expensive CD players look cheap.