CD players are back ?

[ajay556]

CD transports/player are making a come back? Kalista, CEC, hegel cd players have the lowest jitter noise ratio ever seen in digital playback system.  

Since this is a Audiophilestyle forum  now - other sources are not taboo anymore. Keep in mind computer was never designed to play high-end audio - Till today it's more of a convenience - dollar to dollar vinyl and CD player have better sound quality. Just take a peak in japan, France, Korea etc...they are hard core audiophiles and they are still buying CD players and of course turntables.

 

[ajay556]

There are sever

4 hours ago, daverich4 said:

I’m not sure how playing back a CD via a device using error correction is going to sound better than playing back a bit perfect rip via computer of the same CD. At any rate, since learning how to rip SACD’s on one of the other threads here I don’t even play those back manually anymore. 

Bit perfect (which includes clock)  does not exist in real life  music - -if computer was bit perfect then innuos would not be selling 15k computer transports. There is only less bit imperfection with  better power supplies and clocks. A simple computer is completely bit imperfect.

[ajay556]

9 minutes ago, Miska said:

I wonder how many companies anymore make traditional CD mechanisms.

 

Lot of "CD players" I've seen recently use CD-ROM drives designed for computers and actually have computer ripping the CD on the fly and playing the ripped data. That's also what HQPlayer has been doing since the beginning (and doing also doing upsampling on the fly). That provided better playback quality already over 10 years ago, and still does... Since the CD is being read asynchronously and faster than playback speed, the mechanism doesn't affect playback at all.

 

Multi-format players such as DVD- and Bluray-players operate this way too when playing a CD.

 

Yes CD using CD- roms,  DVD players, SACD etc are enemies of CD playback. This was a marketing ploy. IF you look at the new cd players they use cd only transports/clocks and are far superior in sound quality. 

[ajay556]

8 hours ago, diecaster said:

 

Ok. Another person to put in my “Don’t Know What They Are Talking About” list.....

 

Of course there is bit perfect in digital audio. It’s not hard to read the bits of a CD perfectly. It happens most of the time. 

bit perfect concept works when you are loading a word document. Bit perfect in music has another variable  - time...and their lies the problem. So it has no meaning if bit perfect is being retrieved and sent to the destination with timing errors. That's why there are so many expensive sources like innuos. Computers are noisy sources. The innuos minimizes the timing errors by big and clean  power supplies and avoiding switches.

people need to realize electric circuits do not understand 1s and 0s. It is all volts/currents and errors are in various forms.

Consider reading a book on digital circuitry and you will quickly realize how complex this topic is and cannot justify by saying bit perfect.

[ajay556]

48 minutes ago, diecaster said:

 

Again, you don't know what you are talking about. Noise is the problem, not timing. Noise on the ground line; noise in the power; and clock phase noise.

I think you are misunderstanding the word timing - its same as clock...and my point again a bit perfect has zero meaning with a a noisy clock as in all computers. And if you think this statement is wrong then you definitely don't know what you are talking about - Moreover, i have a computer /electrical engineering degree from u of A.  Whats your background - please don't say computeraudiohpile website 😉

[ajay556]

3 hours ago, marce said:

A computer is bit perfect though otherwise it would not work. Signal integrity includes the clock, jitter, noise etc. an eye diagram is a perfect example, the whole point of them is to ensure the data received is the same as the data sent. Using USB or ethernet allows the data to be buffered and then we only have to worry about the DAC local clock, instead of reading 256 bits for every 16 bit sample in real time (allowing for Reed Solomon) from a spinning disk...

Yes i do understand the bit perfect concept but in music you cannot talk about bit perfect without the clock - just does not make sense. 

There are several clocks needed to play digital music. You simply cannot send the buffered data  and have DAC reclock without errors and independent of the source. There must be a clock in retrieving data and is always going to be depended on the DAC clock. Otherwise you could simply use a macbook and get the same sound quality as innuos 15k Behemoth connected to a reclocked DAC.

 

[ajay556]

quote from kalista review  -

The Kalista Dreamplay/DAC take the notion that CD is a dying medium and stomps all over it. If you listen to this player as a player then go back to the very best streaming can offer, you’ll start to wonder if we’ve taken a wrong turn in sound quality. This might be perhaps the most elaborate way of spinning a polycarbonate disc in a time of absolute convenience, and the cost might cause even the most spendthrift and well-heeled of audiophiles to think twice, but it sounds fantastic and that is ultimately all that matters.

[ajay556]

6 hours ago, diecaster said:

 

Of course you can! My DAC, a PS Audio DirectStream, has a track you can play that will show the text “Bit Perfect” on its display if the track gets to the DAC bit perfect. I have done this over USB and the Ethernet interface using both a direct connection and a Roon (with and without HQPlayer). 

 

So, again, you show you have no idea what you are talking about. 

 

 

ok you are just not getting the concept. You are thinking PS Audio bit perfect has anything to do with this conversation...thats like saying my  300 watt amp performance perfectly at 300 watts ...  And fyi..i had PS audio direct stream too..i sold it for a CD player that killed the PS audio in music performance....PS audio makes great digital players but its not in par with truly high end digital playback - there goes your bit perfect logic....so please sign off from this thread

[ajay556]

Just like wattage has little to do with sound quality of the amp - bit perfect has very little to do with sound quality of the digital playback ....so we need to stop using bit perfect as indication of a perfect digital player. That is just sound bite and great for marketing

[ajay556]

here is a review of the PS audio player from top magazine ..it says discs are better and i agree 100%. The  PS audio is not even using a dedicated cd transport but a oppo dvd player transport

 

In an era of streaming network-attached digital music sources you might think the time for listening to music as played from spinning silver discs is past, but that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, if you have read between the lines of commentary from many of our reviewers you might have noticed a quiet trend; namely, a softly spoken preference for the sound quality of music played from discs as compared to the sound of the same music played from network-connected players or servers. It’s hard to say what accounts for this preference, but one explanation may be that top-shelf disc players are able to harvest audio data from discs with very few read errors (and thus minimal intrusion from error detection and correction algorithms) and can likewise present that data in as jitter-free a manner as possible. If that’s the case, then high-quality disc players may still enjoy a worthwhile performance edge vis-à-vis typical streaming solutions, meaning our prized disc collections might in turn have a new lease on life

[ajay556]

11 hours ago, diecaster said:

 

I couldn't care less what you think of my DAC. Based on what you've posted, you have no idea what you are talking about anyway.

 

My point is that I know the digital chain I am using gets music files to the digital side of my DAC bit perfect. The DirectStream DAC completely ignores the clocking from the data stream and figures out the frequency to use based on the data itself. In other words, the raw data is read in and clocked using the DirectStream's internal clocks only. The quality, or lack thereof, of the external clocks matter not. Again, the music data gets to the DAC bit perfect, no matter what you think you know or say.

you really need to study digital processing before you can make any claims. Music reproduction is not that simple. If your external clock has no dependency on your DAC then please try another transport like innuos statement or even a ayon CD transport and you will hear a huge improvement  in sound quality.  You are sounding like a parrot repeating the same phrase. I dont want to be rude but you leave me with no choice. PS auidio is definitely doing a good job in marketing for you .🙂

 

This is my last statement as i cannot waste my time educating consumers who have no idea in engineering concepts.

[ajay556]

This is my point from the review...thats it

In an era of streaming network-attached digital music sources you might think the time for listening to music as played from spinning silver discs is past, but that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, if you have read between the lines of commentary from many of our reviewers you might have noticed a quiet trend; namely, a softly spoken preference for the sound quality of music played from discs as compared to the sound of the same music played from network-connected players or servers. It’s hard to say what accounts for this preference, but one explanation may be that top-shelf disc players are able to harvest audio data from discs with very few read errors (and thus minimal intrusion from error detection and correction algorithms) and can likewise present that data in as jitter-free a manner as possible. If that’s the case, then high-quality disc players may still enjoy a worthwhile performance edge vis-à-vis typical streaming solutions, meaning our prized disc collections might in turn have a new lease on life

[ajay556]

16 minutes ago, crenca said:

This thread has made no sense from the beginning.  Ajay does not seem to have a point, other than some vague audiophile assertions about digital audio that are meant to support audiophile solutions - which is commodity hardware sold at 10, 20, 30X its regular price.

 

Best to let it go I suppose...

That is my point - this review  from top magazine

 

In an era of streaming network-attached digital music sources you might think the time for listening to music as played from spinning silver discs is past, but that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, if you have read between the lines of commentary from many of our reviewers you might have noticed a quiet trend; namely, a softly spoken preference for the sound quality of music played from discs as compared to the sound of the same music played from network-connected players or servers. It’s hard to say what accounts for this preference, but one explanation may be that top-shelf disc players are able to harvest audio data from discs with very few read errors (and thus minimal intrusion from error detection and correction algorithms) and can likewise present that data in as jitter-free a manner as possible. If that’s the case, then high-quality disc players may still enjoy a worthwhile performance edge vis-à-vis typical streaming solutions, meaning our prized disc collections might in turn have a new lease on life

[ajay556]

14 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

 Especially if the players first save the whole track to internal system memory .

its not as simple as that - if that was the case then streaming ( saved to same internal system memory) would sound the same as a disc? The article states the contrary. My point is making technical comments should be out of this context -  its the listening that speakers louder. I would like to hear from folks who have actually spent time listening to the latest CD transports from hegel, Jadis, CEC, TAD  (using CD drives from sanyo, phillips, etc) 

[ajay556]

6 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 Personally, I don't accept that streaming can sound quite as good as direct play from a player of this type, where the ripped contents are saved to memory in an optimised player that does nothing but perform this task, and clocks out the data using a highly stable oscillator.

Yes i agree - 

[ajay556]

12 minutes ago, crenca said:

 

I appreciate your response, but the "..one explanation may be.." from that article is simply not credible.  It makes no sense in relation to how digital communication (and in this case, spinning discs vs servers vs streaming vs fill_in_the_blank) actually works.

 

A much more credible explanation for this alleged "..softly spoken preference.." is the subjectivised, biased, art & wine culture of the audiophile review.  In other words, it's not the technology and engineering, its whats going on in their heads that explains this "preference".

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.

[ajay556]

I think people are thinking CD devices are inferior. But the problem is most cd players today use CD ROMS or SACD devices which degrades CD playing . Moreover, if you have a clock that handles several formats 44,96, DSD it degrades the clock for RBCD 

 

 

I just compared a new digital source and dac/preamp $12k to a

Dedicated new CD player (it only plays CDs at 44 and nothing else) with separate preamp - $12k

So my comparison here is primarily what you get for same price - 

The CD player was more musical.

 example - i do play the piano and very familiar with the sound - CD was much closer to the actual piano sound.  The difference was not subtle but rather very signficant.

I don't want to reveal the brands as i feel it will upset a lot of folks.

 

 

[ajay556]

 

11 minutes ago, semente said:

 

Accuracy takes you closer to the sound/music.

 Yes that should be all be everyones goal here regardless of what technology we use and what notions we have.