Who listens primarily to Redbook CD?

I like what Audio Note did. They listened to the available DAC chips and chose the Analog Devices AD1865 based purely on sound. When it was discontinued, they bought up all the remaining stock, so they wouldn’t be forced to change over to a sonically inferior one.

They are are currently working on an R2R DAC using discrete resistors, which, reportedly, sounds much better than the AD1865.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v260/TomBerry/0728b2915ce0892e44fe42934e521cd9_zpsmqay4v8m.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v260/TomBerry/b53e6cb9d8ac3cdf036c3da279a3b8d8_zpshk0zdrci.jpg

Schiit Yggdrasil is a modern R2R ladder DAC that will play hi res PCM.
Uses a very accurate chip designed for military applications but adapted for music by Mike Moffet, the developer of the original stand alone DAC. It sounds way better than any sigma delta DAC that I ever heard (though I haven’t heard any of the super expensive ones.) See what Robert Harley has to say about the Yggdrasil in the current TAS. Seems I now have little use for my many SACDs because CD on the Yggy is spectacular.

I found that DVD players, even the inexpensive ones, often sounded better than some dedicated cd players did due to their (often) superior error correction, etc as needed to read DVDs.

You’ll find focal length and width distant is different for each. Look at the bottom of the graph.
Each is best for it’s own format/purpose.
https://wiki.metropolia.fi/download/attachments/61608878/Comparison_CD_DVD_HDDVD_BD.svg.png?version=1&modificationDate=1355147497000&api=v2

Cheers George

I listen mostly to jazz and have over 1500 CDs and have until recently only listened to them through my Red Wine battery powered CD transport (into a Metrum NOS DAC). Ripping and serving from HD or SSD makes sense to me, from a downsizing perspective as well as the error correction you get from the rip (and some of my CDs are pretty old and well used so I'm sure that helps). So I have been experimenting with HQplayer on my laptop as a cheap first step in analyzing HD streaming over USB vs cd transport over BNC as the source. This setup allows me to try upsampling as well. First impressions: even without tricking out the source with USB reclockers, linear power supplies, etc I am getting excellent sound so it bodes well for moving to a dedicated music server. One surprise, I don't hear much if any benefit from upsampling though I have a lot more playing to do in that area. It's what makes this hobby so much fun!

One can't help wondering if copying an audio cassette would also result in a copy that sounded better than the original. Or is that just too crazy?