is there a current production 20 bit cd player ?

Eldartford (and anyone else who wants to respond): You wrote above: "Oversampling came into the audio field with the first Phillips CD players. They used a superior quality 14 bit D/A with 4X oversampling whereas Sony used a true 16 bit converter that was less than perfect. The Phillips players sounded much better than the Sonys, but the part that really makes me chuckle is that Phillips, who was in partnership with Sony on the CD development, never bothered to tell Sony what they were doing until it was too late for Sony to react."

You may well know more about this than I do, but it's my understanding that most of the development work on redbook CD was done by Philips, that it's really basically a Philips development, and that Philips only brought Sony in late in the game because of a conviction that a major Japanese player needed to be brought in to assure world-wide marketing success of CD. (That would also account for what you describe above.) What is your understanding?

Another mystery to me is that I frequently hear audiophiles (especially the vinyl crowd) say that early digital was awful but that it's gotten a lot better in recent years. I don't question that today's best digital is better than ever (or can be, in the right hands). But I've been collecing CDs for more than 20 years now; I climbed aboard the digital train early on, and now have a CD collection (mostly classical) of well over 2,000 CDs. And one of the peculiar things I notice is that some of my reference CDs are still "early digital," that is, recorded 1980-1983. (A good example would be recording engineer John Dunkerley's Decca/London CD of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, with Dutoit and the Montreal SO, recorded in 1980.) Some other "early digital" CDs are, of course, not good at all. Which leads me to conclude empirically that the quality of the sound in earlier digital recordings has more to do with (a) the skill of the recording engineer, (b) the quality of his equipment, and (c) the recording venue than with the presumed inadequacy of all early digital recording. I've got some classical CDs recorded 1980-1983 that have superb sound. What do you think?

Texasdave...

I always thought that Sony had a more or less equal part in CD development, but you may be right about that. I vividly remember driving over to Albany NY having already decided to buy my first CD player, a Sony, and then being astonished at how much better a Mission player sounded. That player was based on the oversampling 14 bit Phillips player, and I used it for almost two decades until it finally quit working. The sound was good right up to the day it died.

The "vinyl crowd" are not bothered by what others see as faults of LP technology, and react with criticism of the alternative, CDs and digital recording in general. (A bit like politics today). Digital recording came before CDs. Many LPs were digitally recorded. Even the early professional digital recording equipment was capable of performance better than the LP and CD media avaliable to the consumer. Also remember that analog microphones are involved when a digital recording is made, and the variation of sound between different microphones is huge compared with any slight difference between analog and digital recorders. Variation of sonic quality is, as you suggest, entirely a matter of the skill of the recording and mixing engineers. This is still true with today's SACD and DVDA.

Sometimes the early versions of recording technology are better than what follows. The very first stereo LP issued was an Audio Fidelity recording of the Dukes of Dixieland. I don't have that LP, but I have a subsequent Dukes recording that came out about a month later. It is well worn, but it has perhaps be best stereo effect of any LP that I own. Also, early Vanguard stereo recordings were made using only two microphones, and they also sound great. After a while the recording companies found that it was necessary to blend LF into mono (horizontal groove modulation) and do compression and peak limiting so that their records could be played on ordinary (non audiophile) equipment. Multitrack recording became the norm, and mixing down to two channels sometimes led to aweful results. Sonic quality deteriorated.