Does anyone out there NOT hear a difference in CD

if you're going to spend $1600, spend it on a used DAC. use your Elite as a transport. Or even buy a cheap DVD player and use that as a transport. Bel Canto DAC3 is awesome and can be had for around that much used. Besides, you also get multiple digital inputs on the DAC3, so you can use a transport into it, a laptop or Squeezebox or whatever you have/will have. Flexibility of a DAC like DAC3 is hard to beat. Most likely it will be better than that Cambridge player you're considering.

should sound considerably better than one from 1992 that cost $800.

You can't be that sure, however, CD players did indeed improve in general around the early 90's with delta sigma DAC's and oversampling becoming widespread. (Principally Higher speed circuits with higher sample rates are what you get with a modern player - you can approach 120 db+ dynamic range on the most recent delta sigma chips but remember your speakers are unlikely to have more than 60 db dynamic range above the noise floor - so do you need it?)

IMHO, the quality of ordinary players was very good by 1995. Your Pioneer uses an early Delta Sigma 1 bit DAC. These DAC designs are very linear as well as low cost because they are easy to make - the higher speed designs push the out of band noise way way high and allow for less brick wall filtering.

Any player before 1990 and I would be worried about Jitter - it was less understood in those days.

Now only a few Resistor ladder multi-bit DAC's have survived - this is because Delta Sigma's specifications have largely caught up with them in terms of the highest specs.

Shadorne

you can approach 120 db+ dynamic range on the most recent delta sigma chips but remember your speakers are unlikely to have more than 60 db dynamic range above the noise floor - so do you need it?

What a heartless remark:)! For a dB junkie like myself, you succinctly epitomised the futility of this race...:(
Oh, and if only the s/ware really had 100dB wouldn't that be fun (and largely inaudible)!

BTW, at 60dB thems spkrs is doin good. Most won't do 25 before kicking a few buckets...

As mentioned above...system resolution is the key here .
It can be wonderful and a PITA !

BTW, at 60dB thems spkrs is doin good. Most won't do 25 before kicking a few buckets...

Gregm,

Indeed, yet it is all too common to see extremely expensive CD players hooked up to the kind of speakers you mention. My ATC mid domes are respected for being around 0.1% THD (around 60 db) across most of the all important midrange with wide even dispersion and at loud live concert/realistic music levels (this is the very hard part - as any old headphone can achieve these low distortion figures at tiny output levels and so can many speakers at modest levels).

However, I have no illusions - almost any modest CD player should be able to perform better than these distortion levels.

I am not sure that many people fully grasp the implications of these performance specifications when building systems. At what point does a CD player become so good that it is enough and other things matter much more (like room acoustics and speakers).