CD players are back ?

[Miska]

5 hours ago, sandyk said:

Miska

 The one that I heard originally also had analogue outputs. IIRC, that is the area my friend did some small mods.

There is a full review of this earlier model from Australian Hi Fi complete with quite a few measurements.

 

Alex

 

http://i.nextmedia.com.au/avhub/australian-hifi_reviews_2012_2012-03_ps_audio_perfectwave_pwt_pwd_review_lores.pdf

 

Combo in that review is a computer reading the CD and an external DAC...

 

[sandyk]

45 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Combo in that review is a computer reading the CD and an external DAC...

 

Looks like I may have grabbed the wrong review . I will need to check what model it was with my friend .

This was some years ago, and the only thing I remember was him removing the disc and it continuing to play, and someone else present wanting to buy it from him.

Perhaps Audiophile Neuroscience can remember more about it ?

 

[sandyk]

41 minutes ago, sandyk said:

This was some years ago, and the only thing I remember was him removing the disc and it continuing to play, and someone else present wanting to buy it from him.

P.S.

It could very well have been a Transport and a DAC , as back them I had only recently had spinal surgery and was unable to get up close and personal with the gear being used.

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

1 hour ago, sandyk said:

Looks like I may have grabbed the wrong review . I will need to check what model it was with my friend .

This was some years ago, and the only thing I remember was him removing the disc and it continuing to play, and someone else present wanting to buy it from him.

Perhaps Audiophile Neuroscience can remember more about it ?

 

 

38 minutes ago, sandyk said:

P.S.

It could very well have been a Transport and a DAC , as back them I had only recently had spinal surgery and was unable to get up close and personal with the gear being used.

 

IIRC it was just the transport which we heard playing into a non PS Audio DAC. The consensus was it was no better than my standard laptop. Dave did some mods ( no idea what) and in a second meeting all of us (5 or 6) felt it was better than my laptop transport. Dennis subsequently had it on long term 'loan'  and Dave agreed to sell it to him but it never happened.

[The_K-Man]

5 hours ago, diecaster said:

 

I don’t think anyone here cares about your disdain for PS Audio. Your wall of text looks like a vindictive rant. 

 

The only PS Audio product I would consider buying is their DirectStream DAC and that was designed by Ted Smith who is an absolute genius and not a PS Audio employee.

 

I would never buy a CD player from them. I don’t think I would a CD player from anyone as I much prefer streaming ripped content. 

". I don’t think I would a CD player from anyone as I

much prefer streaming ripped content"

 

Spoken like a true millennial.  

 

Streaming for me is a convenience when on vacation, and it still has a ways to go to match the fidelity of Red Book CD.  At home and in the car, it's a combination of CDs and the phone for me - wired of course, into the Aux jack, or at home through a vacant tape-in, not Blue Tooth.  

[Miska]

3 minutes ago, The_K-Man said:

Streaming for me is a convenience when on vacation, and it still has a ways to go to match the fidelity of Red Book CD.

 

It may not be the streaming, but the different mastering... For example one of the very early CD releases of Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon is best, then second is the first SACD release. And the newest "remastered" version is the worst... Also the first CD version of Meddle is better than the latest.

 

Loudness wars have killed lot of good music.

 

[The_K-Man]

11 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

It may not be the streaming, but the different mastering... For example one of the very early CD releases of Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon is best, then second is the first SACD release. And the newest "remastered" version is the worst... Also the first CD version of Meddle is better than the latest.

 

Loudness wars have killed lot of good music.

 

 

Glad you are one of the few who has come around to see my point of view!

 

But as for streaming, it has and will still remain a convenience item for me.  Long periods of streaming audio and video for me feels like I'm missing out on something.  Like blinking my eyes rapidly during, say, a streamed video.   It's an extremely data-compressed medium.  You're hearing perhaps only 1/5th of the audio in the case of music, and video in the case of a movie, compared to CD, DVD, Blu Ray, or even videotape!

[mansr]

10 hours ago, crenca said:

You mean you would deny yourself the "Advanced Digital Lens" which "focuses digital data"?  You don't know what you are missing!  HQPlayer would be an even better product if it only had focus.

I suspect it's not so much focus as it is hocus, possibly with a dash of pocus.

[marce]

11 hours ago, ajay556 said:

Well most of audio (and any other technology)  does not make sense to engineers  - like power cables, audio cables, quantum mechanics etc...we are still in infant stages of how electronics really works and that is why technology improves every year as we learn more. So the best way to understand  -  is to listen - otherwise we will be blue in face talking in theory especially since this is not an IEEE forum but an audio forum.

What theory, there has been zero technical content... We are not in the infant stages of how electronics work, or how signals flow... Thats why 5G is being rolled out and we now have LIGO...

[jabbr]

8 hours ago, The_K-Man said:

 

A red book CD player is clocked to take,  neither 44,100.3 nor 43,099, but precisely 44,100 readings, or samples, per second off a CDDA disc.  Within each one of those 44,100 samples read, there are over 65,500 values for each sample, from -65,500 to 0dB full scale.  That's over 2.8million value points per second.  Pretty precise if you ask me!  

Run, do not walk, back to your local community college and take an introductory math and digital electronics class. 

[Richard Dale]

33 minutes ago, jabbr said:

Run, do not walk, back to your local community college and take an introductory math and digital electronics class. 

That seems a bit over the top to me. Wouldn't it be easier to describe the mistake you think The_K-Man is making, and try and restate a revised description in plain language? Everything he says seems correct to me apart from the assumption that to send an unsigned 16 bit value involves sending '65,500 values for each sample', because it actually involves sending 16 bits for each 16 bit sample. Where a bit is either a 1 or a 0.

 

 

[Blackmorec]

16 minutes ago, Richard Dale said:

That seems a bit over the top to me. Wouldn't it be easier to describe the mistake you think The_K-Man is making, and try and restate a revised description in plain language? Everything he says seems correct to me apart from the assumption that to send an unsigned 16 bit value involves sending '65,500 values for each sample', because it actually involves sending 16 bits for each 16 bit sample. Where a bit is either a 1 or a 0.

 

 

Just for clarity, a 16 bit number can be any value between 0 and 65,536

 

He obviously missed the word ‘possible’ before ‘values’

[jabbr]

3 minutes ago, Richard Dale said:

That seems a bit over the top to me. Wouldn't it be easier to describe the mistake you think The_K-Man is making, and try and restate a revised description in plain language? 

 

“mistake you think” ???

 

Ok let’s see:

 

There are entities called numbers: numbers can be either real or integer. In digital electronics the integer values are bounded by the number of bits assigned to the value. Because digital numbers are most often represented as an ordered series of binary bits, the values are often 0 to 2^n-1 for an unsigned integer. 

 

... (skipping other basic binary number concepts) ...

 

A CD encodes audio as a series of  values with 44,100 samples per second. Each individual sample is represented by 16 bits. 

 

... but this is entirely irrelevant for the topic at hand because the same number of samples per second for CD as well as 16/44100 PCM on a PC.

[Richard Dale]

3 minutes ago, Blackmorec said:

Just for clarity, a 16 bit number can be any value between 0 and 65,536

 

He obviously missed the word ‘possible’ before ‘values’

Being pedantic it is actually 0 to 65,535

[alfe]

 

[Shadders]

5 minutes ago, alfe said:

 

Can one assume that the RETURN button failed to function on the day you wrote that article.... ?

[daverich4]

3 hours ago, The_K-Man said:

". I don’t think I would a CD player from anyone as I

much prefer streaming ripped content"

 

Spoken like a true millennial.  

 

Streaming for me is a convenience when on vacation, and it still has a ways to go to match the fidelity of Red Book CD.  At home and in the car, it's a combination of CDs and the phone for me - wired of course, into the Aux jack, or at home through a vacant tape-in, not Blue Tooth.  

 

“Streaming RIPPED content”

 

”streaming for me is a convenience while on vacation”

 

You two aren’t talking about the same kind of streaming

[Shadders]

2 minutes ago, daverich4 said:

You two aren’t talking about the same kind of streaming

This is the golden age of audio....

[Hugo9000]

9 hours ago, diecaster said:

 

I don’t think anyone here cares about your disdain for PS Audio. Your wall of text looks like a vindictive rant. 

 

The only PS Audio product I would consider buying is their DirectStream DAC and that was designed by Ted Smith who is an absolute genius and not a PS Audio employee.

 

I would never buy a CD player from them. I don’t think I would a CD player from anyone as I much prefer streaming ripped content. 

What happened to validity of claims depending on evidence and not the person stating a claim?

 

The proprietors/marketers of PS Audio made a claim.  It is plainly false, I provided a link showing another company was doing something PSA claim is so extraordinary, but other, more mainstream companies did it earlier.  In the case of Denon, MUCH earlier.

[The_K-Man]

2 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

Just for clarity, a 16 bit number can be any value between 0 and 65,536

 

He obviously missed the word ‘possible’ before ‘values’

 

Thanks!  In the context of the conversation I figured that would be understood.

[diecaster]

8 hours ago, The_K-Man said:

". I don’t think I would a CD player from anyone as I

much prefer streaming ripped content"

 

Spoken like a true millennial.  

 

Streaming for me is a convenience when on vacation, and it still has a ways to go to match the fidelity of Red Book CD.  At home and in the car, it's a combination of CDs and the phone for me - wired of course, into the Aux jack, or at home through a vacant tape-in, not Blue Tooth.  

 

You might want to read the “streaming ripped content” text again and figure out what that means. 

[diecaster]

9 hours ago, Miska said:

 

It may not be the streaming, but the different mastering... For example one of the very early CD releases of Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon is best, then second is the first SACD release. And the newest "remastered" version is the worst... Also the first CD version of Meddle is better than the latest.

 

Loudness wars have killed lot of good music.

 

 

I actually prefer the MFSL mastering of DSOTM to that early Harvest release you mention. The 2011 mastering is actually really good too.

 

I have spent the last year collecting the best CD masterings of the CDs in my collection and added a bunch of new CDs too. After doing this for a while, I am of the opinion that mastering choice is extremely important. So important because getting the wrong mastering can make a great system sound pedestrian. In fact, a bad mastering can make a great system sound worse than a decent system playing a good mastering.

[The_K-Man]

19 minutes ago, diecaster said:

 

You might want to read the “streaming ripped content” text again and figure out what that means. 

 

I'm from the 20th century.  I don't need to know what all that means.  

 

I do rip tracks from my CDs into mp3 & wave in iTunes, then transfer the tracks to my iPod and iPhone.  

 

I would assume "streaming ripped content" means to access files ripped from CD that are stored remotely, in the Cloud, etc.  Either way it doesn't matter as I do not use the 'Cloud', being as I am, from the 20th century.

[Miska]

2 minutes ago, diecaster said:

I actually prefer the MFSL mastering of DSOTM to that early Harvest release you mention. The 2011 mastering is actually really good too.

 

I think unfortunately I don't have the MFSL mastering, if it is one of those black banner "Mobile Fidelity" cover ones (?)... The 30th anniversary version is not too bad, but the newest remastering added bunch of extra compression and used modern type of ADC which needs some DSP fixing with apodizing filters. The old one is not pushing against 0 dBFS.

 

10 minutes ago, diecaster said:

I have spent the last year collecting the best CD masterings of the CD in my collection and added a bunch of new CDs too. After doing this for a while, I am of the opinion that mastering choice is extremely important. So important because getting the wrong mastering can make a great system sound pedestrian. In fact, a bad mastering can make a great system sound worse than a decent system playing a good mastering.

 

Yes, and also one reason I've spent enormous amount of time to figure out how to make even bad ones sound better and less painful...

 

Good recordings are sort of "easy playback" in a way. Or at least bad material puts different kind of challenge to the system.

[Miska]

6 hours ago, Richard Dale said:

Being pedantic it is actually 0 to 65,535

 

And it's signed, so -32768 to +32767