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Who listens primarily to Redbook CD?

My primary (only, actually) source is a CEC TL5 Transport feeding an Audio Note Kit 1.1 NOS DAC through a Cerious Technologies Graphene Extreme AES/EBU digital cable. They are both decked out with CT GE power cords, Synergistic Research Quantum Black fuses, Herbie's Audio Lab Tenderfeet isolation footers, plus other misc. tweaks.

Sounds great, and I have very little desire to add another source. Pretty much all the music I want is available on CD, and is usually quite cheap. I hope to upgrade to an AN factory DAC (3.1x/II, or better, would be nice), and a Teo Audio liquid metal digital cable (I have their Game Changer ICs, and absolutely love them!) in the future.

Who else is happy with Redbook CD as their primary source?
tommylion
shadorne's avatar
shadorne
7,333 posts
 
@teo_audio   

I am am aware that R2R DACs are impossibly expensive - this is because they are trying to compete with the latest 21 bit resolution of Delta Sigma and the technology is limited by the ability to build a resistor ladder to such high accuracy as to be competitive with Delta Sigma.

How this is conflated to mean that R2R is better?? Only if you equate more expensive with better...

I had R2R ladders in several older generation CD players but current Delta Sigma DACs are far superior (at least to my ears.)
shadorne's avatar
shadorne
7,333 posts
 
It is well known that the optical reader of a CD is motorized. It has been shown that oscillations in this motor (as it attempts to read a spinning disc) can induce via these fluctating power supply demands a subsequent spurious jitter in the CD player output. This is why a copy of a CD might play better (or not) on a particular drive. It is nothing to do with bits but all to do with mechanical reading of the spinning disc data using a servo motor that is drawing power in a cyclical manner from the same power supply used to covert the digital to analog...
stfoth
435 posts
 
--The tech is way over my head, but is it possible that a cd ripped to a hard drive, particularly a SSD can also sound better because:

1. Ripping can take many, many passes over the disc to try to get a perfect copy, whereas;

2. A typical cd player just takes one pass and, whether lightly buffered or not, uses error correction;

3. So that the copy might actually be a more accurate digital representation, with fewer errors to correct?

Just a WAG, but it’s not like an analog tape copied to another or like Doug Four in Michael Keaton’s Multiplicity. "I like pizza, Steve." "I got a wallet."

--I listen to CDs, but have been considered ripping them to a Vault 2 or something similar.
shadorne's avatar
shadorne
7,333 posts
 
I should add that current leading converters use very many parallel 1 bit Delta Sigmas to reduce SN. This eliminates the major drawback of a Delta Sigma 1 bit converter. The linearity and consequently low THD is the major advantage of Delta Sigma 1 bit over a ladder 16 bit DAC. Since the noise issue of early Sigma Delta DACs has been resolved (by using many in parallel) their sound has improved and surpassed R2R ladders DACs to my ears and IMHO. I believe the performance measurements of current leading Delta Sigma DACs support my contention - unsurpassed SN, THD etc.
larryi
1,972 posts
 
I listen mostly to CDs, although I have many LPs that are superior in sound to the CD reissues of those albums.  I actually have ripped all of my CDs to WAV files, so I am not actually listening to the CDs themselves, even though I could do that as well (a music server is much more convenient than playing CDs).  I don't know about attributing performance to particular technology, but, I believe my server employs a R2R ladder DAC.
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