The penguin has slipped off his perch

I've been comparing my Sony DVD recorder with my CD73 this morning. The odd thing is I can barely hear a difference: sure the 73 has a tad more ebb and flow to the music and digs slightly deeper in the bass - hardly noticable. You really have to squint your ears, as they say in Surrey. . .lol.

Either my hearing, something that's never let me down, has gone AWOL or contrary to reviews there's minimal difference between a dedicated CDP and music played through a DVD player (or in my case, recorder).
 

chebby

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The CD player section of my old Arcam Solo-Mini was derived from CD73 bits and was pretty lucklustre.

I have sold that now and (thanks to Arcam raising the Solo-Mini price to £750 and WHF making it an award winner) easily got the £500 I asked for it
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Around March - April this year I was auditioning a lot of sub £1000 components including the much praised/reviewed Arcam FMJ CD17/A18 CD/amp combo and just did not 'get it'.

I assumed a £1200 amp/CD pair would all sound much better but actually preferred my Solo-Mini (at least the amp part of it anyway) despite it having less power.

A friend used to have a CD72 + A65 before moving house and replaced it all with Primare I30 and a Rega Apollo. He was never really that happy with the Arcam stuff. Too civilised for his tastes. Ok for nice background music. (He now uses the A65 in his bedroom system with my old KEF Q35.2's but replaced the CD72 with my old NAD cd player.)

I have heard it said so many times that Arcam should not be judged by it's entry level equipment, but - let's face it - that is not a good reason why we shouldn't judge Arcam's entry level components by it's entry level components!

Rega's entry level Apollo CD player is a great machine at the same price as the Arcam's first rung CDP offering and I would recommend it every time as a far better alternative.
 
A

Anonymous

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I've found ripping CD's onto the Sony 970 Hard Drive to be an excellent way of listening to them.

Really 1st rate!
 

Craig M.

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my experiences of comparing digital sources has shown me that switching from one to the other the differences can seem minute, but when you forget about trying to hear differences and just "live with it" for a while, then the true character is much easier to hear. when quickly swapping between a beresford dac and an arcam cd37 i could barely detect a difference, the reality is they sound quite different. this was only apparent after a couple of days use.
 

method man

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I agree craig.

i often see written on here a similar story of swapping from one souce to the other and noticing no difference.

However, a very expereinced chap from a hi-fi store that was reccommmendee to me by a senior chap from Linn told me his way of looking at such things.

it boiled down to giving the source/component change some time. you might not notice it straight away. it might take a few days/weeks. but are you listening more/less. easily disteacted more/less keep skipping from track to track more/less. this , he believes is the real judge.
 
Craig M.:my experiences of comparing digital sources has shown me that switching from one to the other the differences can seem minute, but when you forget about trying to hear differences and just "live with it" for a while, then the true character is much easier to hear. when quickly swapping between a beresford dac and an arcam cd37 i could barely detect a difference, the reality is they sound quite different. this was only apparent after a couple of days use.

Thirty years of buying hi-fi and still surprises me. "It's a funny old game . . ."
 

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