Ruminations On CD Players


After multiple factory rebuilds, I'm ready to replace my twenty year old Arcam CD-73 CD player.  I've looked through lists of recommended CD players in the $2000 range, and have noticed that some are all-inclusive while others have separate transports and DACs.  Other than ease of replacement, what are the benefits of having the transport and DAC separate?  Any recommendations on CD players in this price range?  I only have music CDs so don't need anything that can do more than that.

 

Thanks,

John Cotner

New Ulm, MN

jrcotner

 

Call me a "dinosaur", a "nostalgist" or even a "nostalgic dinosaur"; I enjoysearching shelves for a CD, pulling it off the shelf, removing it from it’s case and placing it into my Jay’s. Perhaps there’s a ritual aspect to it -- I haven’t psychoanalyzed myself in this particular regard but it’s physical media for me!

@stuartk Well, that’s fine if you enjoy the “ritual” and playing the same stuff over and over again.  But what you’re really missing out on more than anything else by not embracing streaming are the thousands upon thousands of new songs/albums you’d have access to (a lot of it in hi res BTW) for the price of just one new CD per month.  Finding and enjoying new music is infinitely more enjoyable than living Groundhog Day over and over. Once you experience discovering worlds of new music, going back and spinning the same CDs seems downright stifling and Neanderthal.  That’s been my experience anyway, and I very rarely spin a CD anymore and don’t miss it in the least.  But, to each his own. 

@soix 

 

+1 very true. You can do both. I still like to pull out a vinyl disk every week or two. But I listen to mostly new music the other 20 hours a week.

I have a Pioneer dv-48 elite CD/SACd player + Merason Frerot DAC. I can literally sing the praises of this combo. One of my close friends has the audiolab 6000 CDT+Merason Frerot DAC. Sound amazing. Well within the budget of you consider used.

Streaming sucks. Why.......because people Don't sit there and enjoy a certain song or complete album...they bounce around playing 1 minute of this song and 30 sec. of the next song etc...etc. ..Put on vinyl and you are forced the listen to your beautiful albums the way the artist intended you to hear them...completely

A lot of over simplified cliches going on here. Let’s look at a few.

 

1) streaming is great because it facilitates exploration of new music, and people that listen to the same stuff all the time are dinosaurs.

Well, streaming does make it easier to hear new music. However the CD era ushered this in, because the cost of producing and storing CDs was lower than vinyl. In Classical Music, budget labels such as Naxos and Independents such as Chandos, Hyperion, and Bridge and a raft of others gave exposure to thousands of previously little known composers. Streaming lowers the barriers again, but the trend was well on its way before streaming. Internet Radio is another great way to discover unfamiliar music.

The Dinosaur Issue-most people here are on the wrong side of fifty and while we have our favorites, and keep listening to them, that is still a heck of a lot of music. I have several thousand CDs on my shelves. Several hundred of them are favorites and it is a rare CD that I don’t enjoy. Frequently I pull something that I haven’t played in 30 years and then wonder why I haven’t given it more love, and it becomes a new favorite.

2) Streaming sucks because it facilitates ADHD style listening, and artists intended you to listen to a whole album at a shot.

Streaming does allow one to jump around. In my genre I still listen to whole albums most of the, even when streaming. For example if I am listening to Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, the chances that I will want to follow the epic first movement with the Can Can by Offenbach isn’t great. However this week I have been obsessed by a short work of J.S. Bach, the Fourth Fugue from Book I of The Well Tempered Clavier. I pulled up 5 different Pianists during the week on Apple Music that I didn’t have in my collection. Wonderful! And we have no evidence that Bach intended people to play or listen to all 24 of the Preludes and Fugues in one sitting so no sacrilege committed there.

Not every pop album is Sargent Pepper or DSOM. Most Motown albums until Marvin Gaye What’s Going On were just random collections of singles. The artist and the label expected you to buy 45s, and the albums were issued as a way to buy multiple records at once when the lp format began to be popular with consumers. Miles Davis albums were someone editing hours of tape into a 45 minute finished product, and I doubt that Miles expected people to inhale them in one sitting or viewed the outcome as a planned journey.

 

These technologies are not mutually exclusive. One can happily play their physical media and also listen to streaming. Or not. I don’t think that we have to badger people to do it one way or the highway