The best CD Player for the money

Magfan - As they say "The beauty is in the eye of beerholder" - some people like NOS players while others like me like a lot of oversampling. I have test disk (Sheffield Lab Test CD) where they imitate NOS an OS with the sound of a drum. I thing that OS sounds better but it is strange to present only a drum.

Another interesting test is music recorded with different amount of THD. I cannot tell 0.03% from 0.1% but between 0.1% and 0.3% something strange happens. Both of them are very clean (very clean recording to start with) but 0.1% sounds a little lifeless compare to 0.3%. Now I can imagine why a little bit of THD or other crap might improve sound.

Magfan - I forgot to answer aliasing. In sampling theory, input signal frequencies that exceed the Nyquist frequency are "aliased." That is, they are "folded back" or replicated at other positions in the spectrum above and below the Nyquist frequency. In case of DAC it is easy to see what happens when you make drawing of a few cycles of sine-wave on the paper. Now imagine that you the frequency of the output samples is less than 2x signal frequency (period longer than 1/2 of the signal period). Lets take period of 3/4. Placing first point at zero we'll get second point at 3/4 (-1) next at next 3/4 (0) then +1 etc. When you connect all the points you will get sine-wave with +/-1 amplitude and frequency of 0.33 of the original signal frequency.

Let take signal of 33kHz and DAC update frequency of 44kHz (1.33x). In result DAC will output (instead of 33kHz) 11kHz (0.33x) at full amplitude (33kHz - 44kHz/2). Nyquist says that in order to preserve frequency information we have to either output them at >2x their frequency or to not have them at all (filter them out) otherwise they will fold starting from 0Hz (DAC will output 22.05kHz as 0Hz and 22.1kHz as 50 Hz, 22.2kHz as 150Hz etc.

Muralman - I read Kusunoki's article and have few problems with it.

I don't understand it either. He is mixed up in my way of thinking. He forgets that we use dither to get a lot more out of LSB's (to remove quantization errors). His assumption that the LSB is the error margin in what we hear is completely fallacious. This article seems to go against conventional engineering wisdom. It is either a mishmash of rather odd assumptions or I just can't follow it.

I would vote for the Rega players, I chose the Apollo myself, but the Saturn is even better.

Kijanki
Yes, I am familiar w/aliasing. My first CD player was a FD1000 by Philips, sold here as Magnavox. It was a 4x OS player of 14bit resolution. If I could find parts for it I'd get it fixed. I'm curious about how it would sound in a totally modern system. The claim for 4x oversample was, as I recall, to move the 'turnover' frequency so far out of band that A gentler, non 'brick wall' type filter could be used and there would be fewer phase problems, while still putting everything above 20khz to the inaudible end. ....Do I remember correctly?
Also, Nyquist frequency is 1/2 sampling frequency?

One other CD question. If the CD is properly encoded, how could there EVER be any frequency above about 20khz?