Repair or Replace - Marantz CD63se

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.

Rar1,

I didn't mean to come off in a negative way. The only point I was trying to make was that, done right, backing up your music files can drop your risk to almost 0. I have to admit, though, you did have some bad luck.

Johnnyb,

"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."

I don't know if I would say primitive. With regards to convenience, then yes, I agree. For sound quality, though, there are quite a few things to consider. The one thing that I think people overlook when getting into computer audio is the analog section of the source. If you look at the design and marketing of most high end CD players, there is usually a very clear focus on the digital section (Transport and DAC), as well as the design of the analog section. I think that's very important. If you look at the inside of any, well thought out CD player, it looks more like a piece of audio equipment than a computer.

In no way am I suggesting that you are not getting good sound or challenging you, in any way. I only ask, what happens to the signal when it gets converted to analog that allows you to get the good sound? Are you using a DAC or the analog output on a sound card? Possibly something else? Not everyone is getting the good results that you are with computer based audio. Any input that you can give can possibly save me, or someone else from making a mistake.

11-03-12: Zd542

Johnnyb,

...
In no way am I suggesting that you are not getting good sound or challenging you, in any way. I only ask, what happens to the signal when it gets converted to analog that allows you to get the good sound? Are you using a DAC or the analog output on a sound card? Possibly something else? Not everyone is getting the good results that you are with computer based audio. Any input that you can give can possibly save me, or someone else from making a mistake.

I'm glad you asked, because getting good computer sound has been a recent and revealing odyssey. There were two main things that turned my computer-based audio into something enjoyable and musically engaging. The first was installing Audirvana Plus and configuring it to upsample in multiples of two. Thus redbook-sourced ALAC files get upsampled to 88.2 Khz instead of 96. This smoothed out the treble a bit. Then I used Audirvana's buffering capability to reserve 5 GB of RAM to buffer music files to RAM before decoding. This *completely* eliminated the bleached, threadbare sound I was getting from streaming directly from a USB hard drive. Third, I set it up to turn off processes that would otherwise create background processes (e.g., backups) and interrupts (e.g., mail announcements). I got some nice AudioQuest Mini-5 cables (PSC+ copper) on closeout from MusicDirect to connect the computer to my line stage. And very significantly, I swapped out a Jolida opamp/tube hybrid line stage for a pure tube (with tube rectifier and ginormous transformer) PTP line stage. THIS was the final flourish, taking all those digital files and rendering them with a natural organic finesse we usually don't associate with digital anything.

So you might say my true tube line stage *is* my carefully constructed analog section. It works for me; I have hardly been able to abide digitally sourced music for years, but with this new setup I can turn a playlist on (Audirvana can work as an iTunes plug-in) and enjoy ALAC files for hours.