Premier Rock Forum

I need me a new CD player. Any ideas? Should I just buy a $50 Sony or spend some real money? Will I notice a big difference with an expensive one?

you will not notice a difference unless you have the complementary nice components to support it, mainly amp and speakers. so if you don't, don't sweat it.

Go for one of those 3000 CD spinner deals. And program it to only play odd numbered songs.

hey

pioneer makes a $180 player that plays everything

dvd, dvd-a, sacd, various cdrs, mp3-cds, normal cds, blah blah blah

i think it's the DV-563A

i would at least listen to this

tm

Tim,

I just got a used Arcam 62T ($325). It sounds great. I've definately noticed a difference from my Sony Carousel. I listened to a whole bunch of players (Arcam, Rotel, NAD - midfi stuff) under the $600 price range, and the Arcam came out on top for me.

As for that universal player for $180, it seems to play every format in a half ass sort of way (ie poor DACs across the board)

Let us know what you decide upon,

gs

Sorry I'm a little late on this.

Browse the Saturday Audio Exchange website for a used or dented NAD or Harmon Kardon. Should be about $300 and will last and last. And sound real purty, too.

And if you mis-spell Harmon Kardon in your browser, you will get an avalanche of porn.

I got a Harman Kardon HD980 about a year ago after my ancient Sony one shit the bed and I like it a lot. Give one a try if you can find one, they're not very expensive.

ARISE!My old-ass Pioneer takes too long to load CDs now and doesn't even do it half the time.So.I bought a NAD 516, which is supposedly the class of the cheap players.It sounds, literally, 5% better. Not very much. And maybe it's sort of less exciting sonically. The Pioneer has a little bass bump and a little extra sizz on the top end.Anyway, WTF, I have a few hundred CDs as compared to a few thousand LPs, so...I don't need anything shit-hot. But I would at least like to experience the slight pleasure of an upgrade.If it's more than $600, I'm probably not interested.Any suggestions? NAD 546 is up next, pending any other ideas.

Still have my Rotel 955AX from 1992 or so. Sounds fine. Also have a Sony PS1 (one of the "audiophile" ones, certain serial numbers or something) and a Sony DVD player I got for $50 that "audiophiles" say sounds great w/ CDs. Compared all three a few years ago and they sound comparable. I ripped everything to mp3 (192 w/ VBR) last year and play it all from an iPod or my Samsung Android phone at this point.

bishopdante wrote:These days you can fit 1,562 CDs on a 1Tb drive, if you use FLAC, multiply that approximately by 5.I agree with your principle but I'm not sure I agree with your estimation. If you're using MP3, 100MB per album is a high-end bitrate. At 10 albums per GB, that means 10 000 albums on a 1TB drive. FLAC halves the raw size, so assuming the typical CD runs 60 minutes, it's roughly 300 MB per album, say 3 per GB to be generous. So a 1TB drive will comfortably hold 3000 albums in lossless quality. Or did you mean uncompressed CDs?Whatever the case may be, tmidgett, you are going to get a lot more service by spending the same budget on a small server and a quality DAC, than a dedicated CD player. Much as I love my Rotel RCD 971.I use mostly Apple gear and I acknowledge its limitations in terms of expense and restriction of access. That said, it was cheap and pretty easy to switch to lossless rips.I used my dad's old Mac Mini G4 (you can pick one up for about $50 these days) with a library stored on an external drive (mine was network attached but it could be plugged into the Mini). I set up iTunes on OS X 10.5 to start up automatically. In the prefs I set it to automatically rip then eject any disc placed in the drive, to lossless quality (ALAC in this case but it can be converted to FLAC obviously), and to keep all media organised in the iTunes library. After migrating all the MP3 stuff etc to that iTunes setup, I started piling discs beside the computer and taking one out, putting one in, whenever I passed. You can do this with the computer set up on a desk or whatever for this phase. I have like 2000 CDs so it took me a month or so to work through them all. It looks up track names and artwork as you go and keeps it all foldered, each day I checked the new imports for any weirdness or errors, took 15 minutes some days.For playback, I bought a used Airport Express, the power brick looking one which people are getting rid of because they only do wireless 802.11n and not 802.11ac and are thus slower. What they do have is lossless CD quality (44.1kHz/16bit) streaming from anything running iTunes, going to a port which is both a 3.5mm jack and a mini TOSLINK optical out for a DAC. So I plugged it into the amp (and another one to the amp downstairs) and named them using the config software - they pop up as a menu saying Living Room and Downstairs (or both) on the iTunes window, simple as that.The Mini is stuck in a cupboard now. Playback is controlled by using remote screen access from my laptop, or on my iPhone is a free app called Remote which gets paired with the Mini's iTunes. Both offer the full library, searchable, playlists and stuff too. Now if I buy or borrow a CD, I walk past the Mini, drop it in the slot and it gets spit out about 5 minutes later, and it's in the library. The drive storing the albums is automatically backed up, plus I still have the physical discs of course.One unexpected side effect is that I play a lot more music, and I dig into my collection deeper than I have in years, probably because it's just a matter of calling it up and hitting play.Lastly - the Airport has decent lossless sound (and the 2014 flat slab version is even better, http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/airport-express-audio-quality-2014.htm) but it wasn't as good as the CD player I had, so I spent $400 on a used DAC which is plugged straight into the Mini now - the Mini is headless without mouse or keyboard in the hi-fi stack. Sounds excellent, works well, job done.