The Law of Diminishing Digital Returns

Once you cross over(no pun intended...)and decide you want more quality in your music it is my belief that one should spend perhaps that extra 20% eventhough there is not a matched 20% improvement. If this is a real quality system then you can spread that extra cost over the life of the system and enjoy it while doing so. If you keep the system for five years then that extra $1,000.00 comes out to $200.00/year or about 75 cents per day and a really good system is certainly going to last much longer than five years.

As others have brought up; it ain't the 5% or whatever value that percent is; it's the difference in the finished product. That means what you now hear makes listening 50% more enjoyable.

I have found CD players in the $200 range are good enough for my ears. I have several with different DAC's and a DAC on my pre-amp also. I have compard them carefully and the difference, if there is one that is audible, is not enough to be meaningful to me.

In comparison, I have a sub working at below 50 Hz and I can tell the difference when this is turned off, even on simply male vocals and at very low SPL levels. I find speakers improve dramatically up to around $1500. Above $1500 the improvements definitely diminish but are still audible. Unlike, CD players and SS amps, the differences between speakers of similar high quality from two manufacturers(at any price) are almost always immediately apparent and audible.

To me CD digital audio, after 25 years of evolution, is at such a good and consistent level of reproduction that it is now the recording/mastering studio quality, my room and the speakers that make the big differences for me.

the devil is in the detail and the price, however, compact disc players cannot create information which is not there to begin with. I recently did my own 'shoot-out' using my mcd 205 mac and s22 revox(under 1k new)with a relatively new wadia 302. Anyone looking for a 5% difference in overall presentation, would have been disappointed. late december i compared the same two players with a cyrus 6 and 8, and although there were differences, no drama there either. with ipods and turntables as sources, and so many great used components at a fraction of their original price, investing in a 'last-great' cd source may not be the best way to spend 'mad' money.

The differences can be huge or small...depending on how well you know your other components and how well you've done at putting those together.

If the rest of your system is 50% away from being all that it can be...another 5% may be a little hard to pick up on, not the icing on top of the cake you may have wished for.

Unfortunately, the goose bumps are at the end of the game...

Dave