Looking for a CD Player


I am in the process of replacing my Moon CD 5 CD Player --- or might be no reason to replace my present CD Player.  The next CD player if purchased is probably going to be my last as I am a senior in age.  My wife and I are tired of getting up and down and up and down did I mention up and down to listen to the other side of an album. So, we have a number of CDs and frankly like the ease of listening to them.  Not wanting to purchase streaming music.  Therefore, we / I need an education on two subjects -    Do we need to have a DAC incorporated in the CD player and secondly do we need to have SACD capability??  Not wanting to spend more than 3000.00.  All the help would be appreciated.

smerk

@dogearedaudio 

That's an interesting twist!

Surely once the music has been recorded, silver disks just have a one time manufacturing and distribution cost.  They are an excellent way of sequestering some carbon as polycarbonate, which is expected to last a hundred years or more.

Streaming costs resources every time it is deployed.  Cloud storage, routers, repeaters, cache storage, transmission lines, cables, wireless, satellites ... and that's before it even gets to you.

It is a quirk of the Internet today that these things appear free to the end-user, apart from fixed access fees.  At the birth of the internet, it was not clear how anybody would be able to make any money from it.  Now less than a handful of US tech giants are hoovering colossal advertising revenues, which we all pay for.

The internet uses a staggering amount of electricity, and it is growing exponentially.  40% is just for cooling data centers!  Estimates of around 10 to 20% of global electricity demand next year will be for the internet.

One of the most demanding internet loads is streaming.  A CD contains 0.6 Gbytes of data, as much as tens of thousands of text messages.  DVDs and SACDs are around 5-Gbytes.  4K Blu-ray is normally 50-Gbytes, about 100 times as much as a CD.  That is why 4K video streams are dramatically compressed, and the best you can expect from most audio streaming services is CD quality.

Streaming performs an unnatural act with the internet, because the internet chunks your data into packets and sends the individual packets over switched networks. There is no guarantee of arrival time.  The internet can only reliably transmit data if data errors are detected and the offending packets re-transmitted.  Streaming gives away error correction in the interest of timeliness, and drops entire packets if need be.

We have recently seen that a routine security update knocked out much of the internet for days.  In a war, the internet will be destroyed very quickly - no more streaming.

@richardbrand

Well, you can certainly make the choices you want to make. I consult for a company that produces digital media, both hard and soft, and over the past 15 years I’ve witnessed hundreds of palletes of returned CDs headed for the landfill, because nobody wants them. And that's just one very small company.  Fortunately that practice is on the decline. And I could be wrong, but I don’t believe CDs count as "sequestered carbon," at least not at the moment. There are efforts to turn sequestered CO2 into plastics, but as far as I know no currently manufactured CDs are made that way.

As for the internet, there’s another horse out of the barn. Might as well object to radio or TV.

@dogearedaudio 

Sounds as if your company uses CDs for software distribution or archiving?

Sequestered carbon means the carbon is locked up, not that it can be recycled!

You presented streaming as the eco-friendly alternative.  I am suggesting this is a furphy (Aussie slang for an erroneous or improbable story that is claimed to be factual).

At least, radio and TV are broadcast services (forgetting the internet versions!).  The last service to stay up and running in a bad bushfire is public radio, provided you have a battery receiver.  I was in Canberra when we lost several lives and 450 homes.  The firestorm was fierce enough to create its own thunderstorms.

The first thing occupying or revolutionary forces head for is the TV / radio station. The internet appears to be equally fragile.

I have no issue with the internet as a medium for distributing files but strictly speaking, that is not streaming.

I love SACD and have 3 players and several hundred SACDs.  I listen pretty exclusively to Classical and we have kept SACD alive.  However the OP didn’t mention his tastes and apparently owns no SACDs.  Just trying to keep it simple for him best serve his needs

$3000 is not going to get you into anything super amzing…I would get a Schiit audio transport for that and a Mytek Liberty II DAC.

Then I would be happy forever.