The CD Player Lie?

Okay...the title is sensational, I know and it's NOT a lie of course, but read on.

Quite recently I had a chance to seriously compare a Jolida 100A, Rega Apollo and a low end modified Oppo. The oppo cost under 300 bucks. The Jolida was also modified and cost over 1500. We also tossed a Sony BD-320 Blu-Ray player into the mix.
Speakers were Magnepan 1.6 driven with a Odyssey Stratos, but we also had a one year old pair of Merlin TSM MMe's on hand along with Creek, Music Hall 25 and Rotel power. The Rotel 1080 was fed through a Rogue Metis (no mods) as was the Odyssey.

While none of this is ULTRA high end electronics, it's good stuff and the speakers are very much world class in transparency.

Here's what we found:

The best sounding player in the group was the least expensive in the Oppo. It had a shallow soundstage, but it's leaner mid-bass was truer to vocals, especially male. The Jolida sounded too thick by comparison, though it was smoother in the highs. The Rega Apollo came in second or first depending on what you wanted. It had a deeper soundstage, but also seemed a bit bright and overly crisp. It was a subtle issue and perhaps different interconnects would help. The Sony Blu-Ray player was a complete surprise. While it was bright like the Rega, it also seemed to extract more articulate bass info, to the point where we checked it's menu for any bass enhancement settings. In the end the Sony, which costs under 200 dollars, produced a viable and enjoyable sound that we certainly found livable, and downright fun.

After several hours of messing around we decided that ALL of the CD players had subtle differences, and all had weaknesses and advantages, especially switching to different systems. It was much like good speaker wires and MUCH less of a difference we had heard 10 years ago with various players. The rapidly improving technology has certainly shrunk the disparity between high end and mid fi by a large margin and you get an ever smaller set of diminishing returns when you step up to costlier CD players.
I had found this exact same result with my system last year, but this was a better test with more variety. My new system will be getting all new components, but I consider the new CD player the least important link in the chain, even compared to cables.

This is what we heard and agreed on. Certainly the "sense" of this hobby will generally not agree, especially if you just spent a fortune on a CD player. It probably DOES have different characteristics, but that's not always going to make it synergistic with the rest of your system. A Oppo beat the Jolida hands down with the Magnepans. There was no doubt. And the Sony did very well.

And that's the truth, at least according to our ears!

Cheers,

Robert B
NY