Looking for CD player recommendations that are a great match with Classe & Vandersteen
Looking for some recommendations for CD players that will mate well with the sound characteristics of a Classe CAP-101 integrated amp and Vandersteen 2C speakers? Cabling is DH Labs Q-10 and Air Matrix. I listen to all kinds of music... pop, rock, classical, ambient/electronic. But, mostly rock and prog rock. My budget is max $600, but I’d like to stay somewhat under that if at all possible. I don’t need a lot of features. In fact, the basics are fine--so long as it has a remote. CD is my primary source (and I love it :)
Further discussion on the OPPO 203: It has a new DAC chip, AK4458VN, from the Japanese company AKM with built in 5 selectable filter rates. If it wasn't for the 5th and slowest rate I would not have made the change from 105 to 203. The feature to play with HDCD decoding was dropped, I only had a few such CDs which will still play as a standard CDs.
@xlinkaudio, Good point about the decoding. I bought a gold MFSL SACD Bob Dylan for $35 and compared it back-to-back with my standard CD for over an hour and had to conclude I couldn't tell the difference. I can tell major differences in recording quality among all the discs I own, even grading them A,B,C,D for sound quality...
I have had what I think is a wonderful cd player, Simaudio Moon Supernova, for several years and enjoy it, but have been using it as a dac only to stream Tidal via a pc. I have forgotten about cds. Tidal offers 40 million tracks at redbook quality and are beginning to stream their "masters" which are at a higher resolution. Like gdnrbob, I have not looked back. I still pop in a cd occasionally just to confirm how good the streaming is. Maybe a cdp with a digital input would offer you the best of both worlds. Good luck.
Transport connected to DAC to preamp I found best reproduction! CD player??? Try Marantz!! Why??? Marantz and McIntosh are owned by same conglomerate! They share technology!
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