The CD Player Lie?


Okay...the title is sensational, I know and it's NOT a lie of course, but read on.

Quite recently I had a chance to seriously compare a Jolida 100A, Rega Apollo and a low end modified Oppo. The oppo cost under 300 bucks. The Jolida was also modified and cost over 1500. We also tossed a Sony BD-320 Blu-Ray player into the mix.
Speakers were Magnepan 1.6 driven with a Odyssey Stratos, but we also had a one year old pair of Merlin TSM MMe's on hand along with Creek, Music Hall 25 and Rotel power. The Rotel 1080 was fed through a Rogue Metis (no mods) as was the Odyssey.

While none of this is ULTRA high end electronics, it's good stuff and the speakers are very much world class in transparency.

Here's what we found:

The best sounding player in the group was the least expensive in the Oppo. It had a shallow soundstage, but it's leaner mid-bass was truer to vocals, especially male. The Jolida sounded too thick by comparison, though it was smoother in the highs. The Rega Apollo came in second or first depending on what you wanted. It had a deeper soundstage, but also seemed a bit bright and overly crisp. It was a subtle issue and perhaps different interconnects would help. The Sony Blu-Ray player was a complete surprise. While it was bright like the Rega, it also seemed to extract more articulate bass info, to the point where we checked it's menu for any bass enhancement settings. In the end the Sony, which costs under 200 dollars, produced a viable and enjoyable sound that we certainly found livable, and downright fun.

After several hours of messing around we decided that ALL of the CD players had subtle differences, and all had weaknesses and advantages, especially switching to different systems. It was much like good speaker wires and MUCH less of a difference we had heard 10 years ago with various players. The rapidly improving technology has certainly shrunk the disparity between high end and mid fi by a large margin and you get an ever smaller set of diminishing returns when you step up to costlier CD players.
I had found this exact same result with my system last year, but this was a better test with more variety. My new system will be getting all new components, but I consider the new CD player the least important link in the chain, even compared to cables.

This is what we heard and agreed on. Certainly the "sense" of this hobby will generally not agree, especially if you just spent a fortune on a CD player. It probably DOES have different characteristics, but that's not always going to make it synergistic with the rest of your system. A Oppo beat the Jolida hands down with the Magnepans. There was no doubt. And the Sony did very well.

And that's the truth, at least according to our ears!

Cheers,

Robert B
NY
robbob
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.
Tomcy6

I know there are better CD players around. But they tend to cost more then a turntable of equal quality. I know someone who has a Jadis JD3 PRO drive. The Jadis costs about €7000 new, a VPI Scout with benz ACE costs €2600. The Jadis is a little better the Scout. He now bought a Musical Fidelity M1 with SME M2 arm and a Transfiguration Spirit MKIII cart and that combo is so much better the the Jadis whil costing about the same.

lat weekend some friends and me compared a Luxman D-05 CD player vs an Acoustic Signature Samba mkII with a simple soundsmith cart. I think the Luxman was about €1000 more expensive. The Turntable was a lot better. We were using a Luxman L-507u amp and DSS monitor speakers.

You can check audio-markt.de for options.

A CD player I know that sounds different is the AMR CD-777. It is a tube based CD player. It sounds different but not sure if it is better.

I paid about €1800 for my VPI Scout with Lyra Dorian. The Scout was 2nd hand the Lyra new. What CD player, new or second hand can beat that combo you think. At the same price range. It sure isn't my CEC TL51x with Wadia 12 DAC.