Okay......best single box reference CD player

The only player mentioned here that I've heard myself is the DCS Puccini, which sounded very good. I've heard other high end players at dealers and all sound different, but I can't say one is necessarily better or not based on my limited exposure.

I'm really trying to understand what it is that makes one CD player in this league better than the other. Are there any that are truly better in ALL aspects, not just those that appeal to a certain listener?

It would help if some objective details were provided to help justify claims that any particular box, Ayre, DCS, PD, whatever, is superior, as in my mind, this should be the case to justify the cost of these players.

In the end, I am still convinced that personal taste is the prime determining factor in many cases.

Measureable objective evidence can be tough to come by when we're talking about the nth degree. Playback Designs reports absolute zero jitter, but until a third party like Stereophile validates it, that's just a report. Owners of Emm report that upgrading the transport improves the overall sound by bringing the mids and bass more forward, but no one can measure anything different, at least so far as I can find.

Why do certain components improve a lot with burn-in? Jeff Rowland told some of us on a tour of his place that he hears the improvement with burn-in but has been unable to measure it. He theorizes that it's due to the dielectrics settling into a a charge, but he can't "prove" it.

I think that the very top players that I've heard are very close in sound and the differences come down to small degrees of transparency and small differences in the emphasis of various aspects of the spectral presentation with more details available in different regions of the EQ that are unmeasureable. All of these top players have eliminated digital glaze from the equation; therefore, they're all pleasant to live with and have you roaring through your CD collection to re-hear everything that you missed before, but there are still very slight differences in other areas that distinguish one from the other and provide us with all this entertaining discussion.

Dave

Agree with Bar81 on Ayre amps.

Killer products; among the best solid state gear available.

DcStep,

I agree that these subtle things are often not measured in practice. However, I do believe that if someone makes a claim that a particular design is the "best" in some regard, they should be able to back it up with quantifiable measurement to validate the claim.

Practically, verbal descriptions like you give work for me as long as they are a result of critical listening exercises. I can tell from your posts that you are indeed a critical listener, so your assessments carry weight for me.

Saying that one player has more detail or smoother response of some sort has meaning to me whereas "player x is/is not in the same league" without something to back it up other than opinion is meaningless.

To me, this high end audio stuff is much like fine wine. You can have two very fine wines that clearly taste different, or are of different styles. Same true of audio.

Also, no two people even have the same taste buds nor ears in terms of the ability for these biological sensors to discern taste or sound equivalently.

Its ironic that as we grow older and claim ability to be more discerning as a result of our experience, the fact is that our ability to hear physically deteriorates over time due to natural biological processes, so technically we are less competent than we were when we were young and still "wet behind the ears". This is a scientific fact, I am fairly certain. Very ironic!

I also believe it is true to a large extent that we also become more opinionated over time and this is a direct result of each person's unique experience.

About that getting older thing, it's true, but not entirely relevent, depending on the listener. You must consider the training and experience that the ears have received. Mario Andretti is over 60 and seldom drives competitively anymore, but he can still outdrive 99.9% of the male population of the western world. His nervous system is probably firing 30% slower than when he was 20, but his experience still leaves him in a different league than the rest of us humans.

Some of us have been playing musical instruments daily since we were ten or so and listening to "high end" stereos since we were in our late teens (decades ago) and we easily hear differences that others don't notice or can't isolate. So, like athletics, I think that listening is a skill that can be refined and honed with practice. Also, like certain skills, it helps to have started early in life and continued to develop over a period of decades.

Dave