The CD Player Lie?

Thanks for all of the comments.

I've owned a LOT of gear over the years and often found that the high end doesn't always provide the best quality sound, especially with electronics and cables.

For the record I've never owned a boring system. Music makes that impossible and no system is ideal for every mood I may experience. Sometimes I want a BIG sound, dynamic and room filling. I want the CLUB experience, which sure is not about imaging! And at other times I want to listen to a solo vocalist or trio of strings. Enter Merlins or Magnepans. The speakers are the leading man in the creation of great stereo sound. The amp/pre is the romantic lead. And the CD player, cables and associated gear are bit players.

10 years ago, or perhaps 6-7, I would have said the CD player was higher up the chain. But the truth, at least to my ears and many fellow audiophiles, is that the CD player has hit a plateau of excellence, where even modest players do great things with music. Yes, you MIGHT find a better player, but you're also likely to make a lateral move at best as well. Or worse, find you older player was better at certain things.

Some of this could be said for the entire hi-fi business. Heck, I have a Definitive Technology system for my large home theater. I don't use it for music much, but it can do surprisingly good things when I do. Great audio continues to trickle down into the lower end and mid fi.

These are my thoughts and experiences based on a lot of years of messing with gear and owning it. When a friend let me know he had just spent over 4K on a player he called me over and we listened and compared. We were not impressed! But we may have never known what was up without a "cheap" 1000 dollar Marantz to compare it to.

As I and others have said, system synergy is key. But my point here in the end is that if you have great speakers matched to a great amp, a CD player is lower in the food chain than in previous years because they've made such huge strides even with 300 dollar machines. I was 100% honest in saying that I hear more dramatic differences with cables than with CD players these days!

Cheers,

Robert

Mapman

All was well and then you brought in a bottle of wine.

Folks do in fact, agree on wine, BTW.... once they've had a couple bottles, they'll agree they're all loaded. Past that there
may be an argument or two on the sound of the music. ;-)

I think price does play a part in a thing being made well and performing well. So long as value is no consideration.

More importantly though is the synergy of the whole of things. The synergy of it all is also determined by the builder… and we all call that preffs.

Personally, I’ve heard boring rigs. Music which had me of a mind to leave it on only for ambience, or background as casual conversation took the lead. Music which sounded so bland as to simply not capture any part of me whatsoever. It wasn’t the music either… it was the rig playing it back. That was a system I’d not have bought with someone else’s money.

In general, price does indicate however broadly, it’s degree of performance. Wether that sort of performance is in fact your cup of tea or not, is another bag of worms.

Price also is a separator. It sets various devices into different boundaries. Lower the price and there are far more entries to be considered. Raise it and the air gets thin there pretty quickly. So too does the number of people who have gotten one for themselves. So there’s some degree of ignorance or a veil surrounding the more costly affairs in audio.

Mix in the invisible threshold of diminishing returns, which has value underpinned to it, and performance itself then begins to decrease, subjectively if not altogether objectively.

The thing is this IMO, there’s an awful lot of good to great out there, and it is made excellent by how it’s all put together a lot of the time.

Improving a piece’s setup into a rigg for one thing may mean you have to use different cabling, or isolation gizmos, than you would for another thing to see them at their best. If no attention to individual setting up of different components is a part of the undertaking, then the results of injecting several likewise items will yield several differing results… as one would expect going into such an event.

The cool factor is the attempt itself. The ‘let’s see what if we…’ approach. Curiosity fuels every past time withit’s devotees, to this degree or that.

A more insightful endeavor would have taken longer and more moves to see which could be made to be at it’s best,, irrespective of the costs for each CDP. With one CDP using tubes, the tubes themselves could have been roled, despite the arguments of it’s modifications.

Perhaps a more pertinent foray would have been to have a few CDPs all of the same topology and closer in costs with which ..to contend.

Nevertheless, some experience and more importantly fun, was the result. That’s always a good thing. That is too, what it’s all about right? That fun thingy?

Actually, there's a lot of convergence in judgments about wine, at least for the best samples. If you're skeptical about this, correlate the scores given by top critics (say, Tanzer, Parker, and Wine Spectator) to the major offerings from Bordeaux in a given year; they can be close enough to make one wonder why anyone prefers one critic to another. The situation may be a bit different among closely matched wines at a price point; here personal preference may result in greater variation.

Maybe something is similar in digital. While one might be hard pressed to find "objective" differences amongst "value priced" sources, with the differences looking more like preferences, the situation might be quite different if you threw a SOTA digital source into the mix. Here, it would not surprise me if listeners converged on a clear preference for the SOTA sample over all of the value priced samples. (I'm not claiming, of course, that SOTA price is neatly elated to SOTA performance.)

BTW, the Jolida, as noted, seems responsive to tube changes.

John

Let me put it this way. I own a VPI scout with Lyra Dorian and a CEC TL51x transport with Wadia 12 DAC. If I would have spend €1000 less and on my digital source and a €1000 more on my analogue source my turntable would sound a lot better but I doubt you could really tell the difference in sound with my CD player.

You're listening to the wrong cd players if they all sound the same. A little research will give the names of players with distinctive and superior sound, some much better than a VPI Scout.