How can we settle for digital?

Are you asking us if it's foolish to spend $3K on a CDP? Just keep in mind that a price point is where the manufacturer stops adding any more value to something. If you take two identical boxes and fit them each with the same laser/transport, filter and DAC you can get two different sounding CDP's. Just use better transformers, filter caps, wiring/PCB's, output transistors and hardware. That one would cost more and (should) sound better. Will it sound good enough to justify the difference? That's where you come in to the equation.

I think what your friend is trying to convey is that the actual retrieval process hasn't changed over the years and the differences in parts and engineering are the polish. I happen to disagree - for what makes one CDP sound better than another is the same reason why one amp sounds better than another: power supply, voltage/current regulation and linear output devices. They cost big money as you move up the food chain and account for a large percentage of the overall cost. Add to that dampening, shielding and circuitry layout that minimizes signal path distortion and you get the idea.

My point was less about CDP's, which can be quite great, and was more about digital recording itself and the CD format. I own and listen to many CD's because either they do not exist on vinyl or the CD beats the vinyl (which happens time to time). If I want to hear Webern played by the Arditti Quartet I must enlist my trusty Meridian 507 24 bit player. That's not the problem. The problem is the engineering behind the recording. Many digital recordings and transfers made in the 90's are truly terrible, and one would get the impression that until quite recently digital just sucks. Granted, it got better, but I still do not hear it competing with the best analogue out there and I doubt it ever will.

Gs5556 said:

"I think what your friend is trying to convey is that the actual retrieval process hasn't changed over the years..."

Well, the upsampling schemes and clocks in DACs have changed a lot in the last 24-months or so.

Dave

We can't! And we won't! Yeah!

I agree with Viridian. Too often on this site, people discuss sound instead of music. As he says, and I would add unfortunately, there are too many great recordings that are only on CD, so I did go ahead and buy a CD player, though I didn't spend $3000, I bought the Rega Apollo for almost a third of that total.

That said, I do agree that digital, though improving as some have noted, will never equal analog in quality. So I continue to buy records at least 90% of the time. Being a professional classical musician, most of my listening is to classical and jazz, and as I have said on a couple of other threads, they simply recorded things better back then in the exclusively analog era. Those recordings are often just as musically satisfying as today's digital releases, and often more so. The technical proficiency of most musicians coming out of conservatories today is much higher even than it was 20-30 years ago, but their musicianship is not correspondingly improved, and conductors are not getting any better either, especially here in the states. But I'm getting way off topic, so I'll shut up now.