Ruminations On CD Players

@soix

I’d never dispute the advantage you cite! In fact, I’m finding it’s been harder and harder to find CDs I want to buy. This has in fact been going on for some time. But this is not for lack of trying! I spend a lot of time on spotify looking around for possibilities. The "problem" is me.

It’s an idiosyncrasy of mine that I’m very album-focused, rather than artist-focused. It’s not at all uncommon for me to own only one or two recordings from a single  artist, because when I compare their entire output, those are the ones that really grab me. The rest, I can do without. And repeated listening rarely changes my opinion. If I didn’t like something 10 years ago, hearing it again almost never changes my initial impressions.

Similarly, I favor a small number of visual artists, photographers and poets, whose work I go back to again and again. Restaurants, too. It’s just the way I’m wired, I guess. If you want to call if "Neanderthal", that’s OK -- I don’t take it personally! ;o)

@tvrgeek  Your perspective on things fits right in with ASR. Whatever works for you have at.

"Several in the high end stores. Did not pay attention to the brand but hooked up to very high end systems. One was a Moon, Another a Mac"

I'll go out on a limb and say that the front end digital equipment was Sim and McIntosh since they make their own

Ironic.  I find ASR useful and informative as I do have an engineering background, designed and modeled in Spice amplifiers, crossovers, and preamps. But most of us understand specs as currently understood are not the last word. I'll take a Hegel over a Benchmark amp any day. The irony is, I was tossed off ASR because I believed ( know) I could hear the difference between DACs and amplifiers. My wife can do with more precision than I. 

I suggested load variances as one factor effecting sound. I also mentioned dynamic compression in tweeters. Both quite real, measurable, but not in Amir's playbook. Harder to measure is the effect on IPS and VAS from bass transients with poor board layout or insufficient dynamic current. Again very real. I can even model it. I found by testing, tweeter breakup causing IM making upper midrange edgy. Again, Amir does not believe this so he banned me.  Not exactly scientific in my book, but it is his site. 

I only have about 500 CDs on my server.  Hitting Goodwill every week to grab any 69 cent one that looks' even mildly good.  I have not gone streaming yet as it takes too much effort.  I am an old guy and do not live with a phone attached to my hand and don't own a tablet.  Eventually.  Soooo much great music out there.  And Sooo much garbage to wade through. I wish I had any assurance that streamed files were at least CD quality.  From what I have heard and read, a lot are just old garbage up-sampled. I gather Qobuz is about the best. I have Prime, but found it to be a mess and did not have half of what I went looking for.

I compared some "HD" streamed files with the same music in RedBook and did not hear any difference,. Always a "but" and in this case, it was not showing the specific edginess that bothers me.  Nora Jones does not hit those notes. She is always smoooooth.  

So, I RIP with JRiver.  Play over USB to my DAC. WASAPI Exclusive, asynchronous. Testing buffer sizes, testing if -3 dB is best. May test ASIO as well but I don't see the advantage. Looking into host based oversampling, normalizing, and any other possible off-line processing to feed the DACs. Or, just a DAC like the RME or Cord that has the power internally.  My PC DVD transport, about $15, reads the disks 100% error free at about 5X. There is nothing else a transport need do.  Any jitter, noise, rise time issues are completely lost when the file is saved to disk.  Just physics.  We now have USB interfaces that don't mess up the signal, even in CH-FI. The DAC chips are all fantastic, which leaves the reconstruction (including clean power) as what effects the sound. Good and bad. 

If you want to call if "Neanderthal", that’s OK -- I don’t take it personally!

@stuartk Sorry, that wasn’t meant toward you at all but rather how the act of spinning CDs today seems to me.  That said, I do find it surprising you’re not discovering tons of new music you’d like to explore and listen to.  I feel like a kid in the audio candy shoppe and am constantly finding intriguing new music all over the place, and more often than not when I go to Qobuz it’s usually there in CD — and often times better — quality.  But, in the end we all experience audio and music the way we enjoy most and that suits us best, and that’s really all that matters.