effect of tubes in cd players

Never heard the Wytechs. I have heard the $250K Wavacs. Now these can do bass for real, and tight.

"When you mention you modding the Shanling and the SS turns out sounding better, is this with modding the tube stage as well?"

Yes.

"Have you thought about disconnecting the headphone stage and coupling these transformers to those of the tube output stage?

No. I try to avoid both transformers and capacitors if possible, particularly transformers. This is because there are so many good choices for coupling caps available now. I try to DC-couple whenever possible, such as my mod for the Benchmark DAC-1.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer

I have had three solid state players, Sony, Rotel, and Marantz. I went with a used Cary Audio player this time and I will not go back to a solid state player. One of my audio friends has a Ah Toeb player, this is also a good sounding player.

It all depends on the CD player involved AND (naturally) what tubes are being used. I have found a HUGE difference in tubes in my stock JOLIDA tube CD player. The best sound came from rare 12AX7 versions and it was immensely different than even the next vintage tube version tested.

Sadly unlike preamp applications, most modern day tubes did not sound good in the CD-100 (to me). I REALLY like the JJ ECC803S tubes in many preamp and amp applications but they sounded just blah in the Jolida. The closest to modern tubes was the recommended Phillips JAN versions. These at least got the player to be interesting.

Further sonic improvement after that required vintage tubes to extract more juice out of the CD listening experience. Of course at some point the tubes start costing a significant amount compared to the cost of the player so that needs to be factored in as well.

I guess it all depends on what type of sound you want to achieve from any CD player. I find non-tube CD players to be clinical at best and I like my CDs to sound as close to my LP sound as possible. Why? Because a lot of modern day music is simply not available on LP - even imported.

Also, for test purposes try some of the Mapleshade CDs. Although rather "dry" sounding when the CD playback experience is "right" they really do convey the "in studio" performance very, very well. After calibrating to something like the "Mojo" CD I can usually then pick out all the processing and the like done in other CDs. Not all of it is bad mind you, just different from a "purist" perspective.

Audioengr,Not all tube stages are created equal so are definitely better than others probably one of the best if not the best one out there now is the Modwright which uses the Alan Kimmel MU stage.

>>I will not go back to a solid state player.<<

It's not about tubes or solid state. Design, parts, and build quality are what matter.

Don't forget that Meitner, Wadia, and Esoteric are all solid state.