Repair or Replace - Marantz CD63se

I'm with Zd542 in this, there are plenty of excellent CD players out there at reasonable prices and it makes sense to have one both to play the CDs you have and to rip discs to a hard drive if you decide to go that way.

Also agree with him about hard drives. It's absolutely true that hard drives always fail, often in less than six years, but having a cabinet full of CDs isn't failure proof, either. One of my friends had her entire collection of more 300 CDs taken by a burglar about six weeks ago. She had no backup and replacing that collection would cost thousands of dollars. The cost of the three hard drives it would have taken to store that collection and back it up to two different locations would have cost less than $200.

I have four copies of my music collection on hard drives. I back up once a week to a second drive on my desktop and alternate monthly backups on a drive in a fireproof/waterproof chest in my basement and another that lives in a locked filing cabinet in my office. With an incremental backup program, that represents about ten minutes effort on my part every week.

Thanks folks. I was certainly of the mind to just move on, but needed some encouragement! Got it. Small budget here so I'll probably go with the Marantz 5004 or maybe Rotel or Rega. We'll see. Not really in the market for ripping. I have many of them ripped to itunes already, but I don't want to lug my computer around or spend all the time ripping and getting into more equipment, though I appreciate the suggestion Johnny. I've got two kids under 2 and hardly have enough time to sit down and just listen to what I have! Guess I'll tell the shop to keep it for parts rather than pay the return shipping. Goodbye old 63SE...

Hi Zd - Understand your point. But it was just lousy luck on my part as both drives crashed within days of each other. My iMac is a version 2.4, considered vintage no less, is no longer supported by Apple, and does not sync with the Cloud and blah, blah, blah. So in reality I was spending a lot of time dicking around with data.

I was researching external drives and was about to pull the trigger on a replacement, when Apple announced the new iMacs about two weeks ago. So, I figured ... what the hey, I can wait a few weeks to buy a new computer and transfer the files over. My current iMac died the following evening.

It is what it is.

Rich

Hi Sfar - Sorry to hear about your friend. With almost 5000 cds, I can't imagine downloading them onto hard drives. No inclination whatsoever and besides I like having the physical media.

The point I was getting at was simple, if you like cds and think that obsolescence is around the corner, pick-up a couple of cd players. It is not much different that your multiple back-up strategy ... if number one fails, you have a number two or three or four.

Rich

11-03-12: Rar1
Johnny ... And then what do you do when the hard drive crashes and dies?

I see you're a Mac guy and so am I. I've had our household wireless network connected to an Apple Time Machine for nearly 4 years, so we have intermittent backups several times a day. If I were to lose my internal drive or a cluster of files, I could retrieve them.

Second, most of my iTunes music is ALAC rips from my personal CD collection, and I still have the CDs,

Third, portable USB drives are CHEEP and ruggedized for portable use. You can get 1TB portable drives from Amazon for under $100. That's enough space to hold 2800 lossless CD albums. For $89 buy two and use one as backup.

The other part of this conversation is that single-play CD players strike me as a rather primitive solution. For $50 I installed Audirvana Plus on my MacBook, enabling me to buffer music files in RAM, adjust upsampling multiples, and turn off processes that might detract from sound quality. Then there's the convenience of having the whole music library at your fingertips and the ability to organize and set up ad hoc playlists at will.

Sonically my MacBook with Audirvana beats my CD players, and I can now play 24/06 and 24/88.2 files through iTunes, whjch totally beats the pants off redbook files.