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The CD player is dead.......

I am still waiting for someone to explain why a cd player is superior to storing music on a hard drive and going to a dac. Probably because you all know it's not.

Every cd player has a dac. I'll repeat that. Every cd player has a dac. So if you can store the ones and zeros on a hard drive and use error correction JUST ONCE and then go to a high end dac, isn't that better than relying on a cd player's "on the fly" jitter correction every time you play a song? Not to mention the convenience of having hundreds of albums at your fingertips via an itouch remote.

If cd player sales drop, then will cd sales drop as well, making less music available to rip to a hard drive?
Maybe, but there's the internet to give us all the selection we've been missing. Has anyone been in a Barnes and Noble or Borders lately? The music section has shown shrinkage worse than George Costanza! This is an obvious sign of things to come.....

People still embracing cd players are the "comb over" equivalent of bald men. They're trying to hold on to something that isn't there and they know will ultimately vanish one day.

I say sell your cd players and embrace the future of things to come. Don't do the digital "comb over".
devilboy
oakleys
78 posts
 
how much is the fanless computer harddrive designed for home stereo?
milpai's avatar
milpai
2,338 posts
 
Devilboy,
To me it looks like you want to show off your new Weiss DAC!! Gimme a break from the computers...it's my profession. Don't want them when I relax!!!!
cwlondon
1,210 posts
 
Devilboy,

I have had a Levinson No. 31 and Sony SCD1 amoung other players, so I feel qualified to comment and think my hard drive sounds just as good.

Now to be fair, it's more fun (albeit less convenient) and a more luxurious experience to load discs into an exotic, expensive and mysterious device, than to click on a piece of plastic, in the same way that it's more fun to go 100 MPH in a Ferrari than it is in a Nissan.

The real reason the "comb over" persists, however, is because no one has yet been ingenious enough to figure out how to put a $500 computer in a fancy aluminum chassis and get neurotic audiophiles like myself to shell out $10,000 for it.

As to the high margin buggy whip salesmen and/or enthusiasts above warning of the dangers of hard drives - do they not understand that hard drives can be backed up??

I have been using computers since 1982, and I have never experienced a hard drive failure. I am now typing on a Lenovo netbook, which has been on about 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 3 years and also has yet to fail. But I back it up regularly, so who cares if it does fail?

Further to defending things which are supposedly horribly unreliable and no substitute for overpriced audiophile gear, I have had a Behringer DEC2496 and 3 Behringer A500s turned on all day, every day, for about 3 years now. They are all working perfectly and going strong.

Vinyl may not be dead, but yes, I would agree the CD player is dead.
clio09
3,346 posts
 
This past CES I had a chance to audition the Sonic Weld USB interface in my system. It was my first direct experience with computer audio. I didn't do anything special to configure my MacBook, just ripped a few CDs (AIFF, error correction) to iTunes and played them back. The computer fed the Sonic Weld via USB and the Sonic Weld fed my DAC via SPDIF. I have to admit the sound was exceptional and compared very favorably to my transport/DAC. However, I never pulled the trigger. It just boiled down to two things:

1. I'm not ready for computer audio. Having followed the PC Audio forum on Audio Asylum the discussions over there can be pretty intimidating, even for someone like myself who is in the computer software industry. Also, those inmates can be just as bad as some vinyl/analog addicts I know ;).

2. The last sentence above leads me to acknowledge that my primary media is vinyl and recently analog reel tape. I greatly enjoy spinning records and my new found interest in analog reel tape conjures up memories of earlier times when tape (cassette) was my only source. Not to mention back then I did a lot of recording, including live shows, and now I have found equal fun recording music on reel tape.

As jaybo said, all media is good if it plays music. Pick your format(s) and most importantly have fun with it.

Oh, and go see live performances as much as possible. There still no real substitute for live music IMO.
thesoundhouse
250 posts
 
I do not really have a dog in this fight as I do listen to mostly vinyl. A couple of my buddys and me have trying many DACs and computer server systems. I have to admit I am very impressed with the sound provided when it is set up correctly. One such set up that shocked me is the new DB Labs Tranquility DAC with the latest super flat Mac Mini with a solidstate hard drive for the operating system and external firewire standard 5400rpm harddrive to store the music. With good cabling and the Mac optimized for music playback only using a program called "Play" for the music management program using AIF apple lossless it is scary good. This set up has ate up all the high end CD players in our group. Here is a list of CD players that have lost. (1) KRELL EVO 505 (2) a plethora of high end Denon DVD/SACD/CD Players (3)Pleathora of Sony higher end DVD/SACD/CD Players and too many other CD players to mention. I believe the CD player is here for a while because of the amount of software laying around. I will put my whole CD collection on hard drive and of course have a back up drive just in case. Music server are the future and with much less jitter than a optical drive has the music server when properly set up it is far superior to most if not all CD players. I will be purchasing the new Audio Research DAC 8 and a Mac Mini in the next few months.
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