is there a current production 20 bit cd player ?

Can anyone tell me what a 20 bit D/A does when presented with 16 bit data?

With oversampling a 16 bit D/A can output discrete levels corresponding to a 20 Bit D/A. That must be what is going on.

In any D/A the least significant bit, and sometimes two, usually toggles randomly from a one to a zero. If you use a 20 or 24 bit D/A to process 16 bit data, at least you can be sure that bit 16 is out of the noise level. For example, you could zero out bits 17-24, and essentially have a noise free 16 bit converter.

Oversampling came into the audio field with the first Phillips CD players. They used a superior quality 14 bit D/A with 4X oversampling whereas Sony used a true 16 bit converter that was less than perfect. The Phillips players sounded much better than the Sonys, but the part that really makes me chuckle is that Phillips, who was in partnership with Sony on the CD development, never bothered to tell Sony what they were doing until it was too late for Sony to react.

Maybe I'm off base here, but why go to 20 bit instead of sticking to Redbook. In fact, if you like Audio Note, why not one of their non-os DACs. You can use your CD2 as a transport, or get another transport. Just thought I'd throw it out there.

Eldartford (and anyone else who wants to respond): You wrote above: "Oversampling came into the audio field with the first Phillips CD players. They used a superior quality 14 bit D/A with 4X oversampling whereas Sony used a true 16 bit converter that was less than perfect. The Phillips players sounded much better than the Sonys, but the part that really makes me chuckle is that Phillips, who was in partnership with Sony on the CD development, never bothered to tell Sony what they were doing until it was too late for Sony to react."

You may well know more about this than I do, but it's my understanding that most of the development work on redbook CD was done by Philips, that it's really basically a Philips development, and that Philips only brought Sony in late in the game because of a conviction that a major Japanese player needed to be brought in to assure world-wide marketing success of CD. (That would also account for what you describe above.) What is your understanding?

Another mystery to me is that I frequently hear audiophiles (especially the vinyl crowd) say that early digital was awful but that it's gotten a lot better in recent years. I don't question that today's best digital is better than ever (or can be, in the right hands). But I've been collecing CDs for more than 20 years now; I climbed aboard the digital train early on, and now have a CD collection (mostly classical) of well over 2,000 CDs. And one of the peculiar things I notice is that some of my reference CDs are still "early digital," that is, recorded 1980-1983. (A good example would be recording engineer John Dunkerley's Decca/London CD of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, with Dutoit and the Montreal SO, recorded in 1980.) Some other "early digital" CDs are, of course, not good at all. Which leads me to conclude empirically that the quality of the sound in earlier digital recordings has more to do with (a) the skill of the recording engineer, (b) the quality of his equipment, and (c) the recording venue than with the presumed inadequacy of all early digital recording. I've got some classical CDs recorded 1980-1983 that have superb sound. What do you think?