Best player for Poorly Recorded redbook CDs?


There is lot on the cutting edge of digital players, Meitner, APL, Esoteric, Zanden, Reimyo, and the list goes on. Most have great reviews and their own followers. The problem is we usually test this with better recorded CDs or do not actually consciously think about how well a player plays poorly recorded CDs. If I have a main player for SACDs and avg-well recorded CDs, is there a player out there that somehow makes poorly recorded CDs sound better, and better than other equipment? Note this only pertains to poorly recorded CDs...and its not about being truthful/accuracy per se...all I want is something that will improve on bad CDs. Meitner is OK at this but I wonder if other players out there (and indeed it may well be a budget player,...who knows) that specifcally do this well. Given as music lovers, we generally own our fair share of poor sounding but great music CDs, I think this is potentially quite important and can pay lots of dividends after some investigation....at least that is the hope. Now thinking about this, its also somewhat surprising that professional reviewers do not really address this aspect much. Hmmm.

Any suggestions? Do you agree with this line of thiniking?
henryhk
How could there be any way to improve on what's on a CD, good or bad? Once it is recorded, that's it. It is cast in stone, or rather in the substrate of the CD. The poorly recorded take is represented by what's on the CD (or in the case of the LP, the grooves) and there's is no going back. We can try to fit the sound to what we think we like by equalizers, cables, amplification, speakers. But all we will be doing is attempting to tone down the damage.
Even if you get all the bits off the CD extracted by the RUR process that the Memory Player uses, you still have the bad recording that was imbedded on that CD.
Now, if you are talking about badly damaged CDs, then the RUR process can, conceivably, produce more information during the extraction process since it looks at the CD tracks many times and not just once as a regular CD player does, ecept the latest Rega model. But that's not RUR and quite another story, though very effective for producing good playback. But even the Rega can not improve on what's on the CD.
But since the RUR proces can extract practically all the info on a CD it is conceivable that with this maximized info the CD will sound better than any other read mechanism. This, and the fact that the extracted info is being played back from the "flash" memory in the Memory Player (where the jitter characteristics are better than in a hard drive), will lead the listener to believe that the RUR process is contributing to making this bad recording sound better. But that better is still limited by what has been imbedded in the spirals of the CD. You can't do better than what has been recorded.
My aplogies for repeating myself.
And, yes, I have heard the MP many times in numerous systems. I am not talking about theory only.
I think the only way to make a poorly recorded cd sound acceptable is to play it on a low resolution system or at least the speakers should not be resolving and should be very forgiving. Ever wonder why some CDs sound better on a boombox than on your hi-end system?
In your system Henryhk, with your components, you pretty much get everything out of the disc you play.

Memory Player costs $10k and is a very high resolution source. It will show exactly what's on a disc. It's up to the rest of the system to show it or not, depending on what's down the system chain.
Yeah, I have noticed car stereos and boomboxes sound a lot better on a lot of my 80s pop/rock cds than my main home system. Kind of ticks me off.
"your'e prob right Audphile1"

He is exactly right, which is why the Merry Go Round is such a FUN and long lasting ride.