CD Got Absolutely Crushed By Vinyl

@kalali

A $5,000 vinyl rig will sound better than a $500 CD player. Try a $5,000 CD player and report back. 


Wow, now that’s a good example of fact-based thinking 🤔 NOT! As in “he said he paid 50% more than I did for exactly the same thing”, so one is a fool and one is a wiseman. Price has little correlation on sound quality after a threshold of VALUE rpt VALUE is attained. By the way, anyone who calls a high end audio system a “rig” is pretty out of touch. 

Since I build a DAC and phono stage the phono beats the CD playback so far by far.  My DAC sounds better than most vinyl rigs in direct comparison so that should tell you something about the phono stage.  Happy Listening..  

The main problem with CD playback is that scattered laser light inside the transport makes its way to the photodetector where it’s detected as noise. The photodetector isn’t too swift. The Green Pen partially corrected this problem by absorbing the RED portion of the scattered light. But the RED portion is only a fraction of the total scattered light since, you know, the laser nominal wavelength is infrared - invisible, 780 nm. The good news is now you hear what CDs were always *supposed* to sound like. More to follow....

My $1,200 turntable sounds better than my $1,400 CD player. The CD player has tubes in it but the turntable don't. I wonder what it all means. Fact: a vinyl record is a reproduction of a real time musical performance.
Fact: a compact disc is not a real time reproduction no matter how you slice it.