EMM Labs on Bad Redbook

Agreed. You are better off buying a secondary, mass market $200 player with rolled-off treble to play those early CD's, and use your high-end CDP for the better recordings.

A dissenting view from the above posts. I don't have the Meitner CDP, but I think that an excellent CDP will make poor recordings sound better than a poor CDP. I listen to some classical music recorded in the 30's through the 70's, and it all sounds better on my current system than my previous, lesser system. Some of these are wretched mono recordings with hiss, alot of audience noise, and tape splices - it is all less noticable with a fuller more rounder sound.

Again, I cannot comment on Meitner and I cannot comment on rock CDs made in the early 80's. Most of the record companies are remastering those, anyway, because they realize the inferiority of the technology when it was new.

Rob

Despite the obvious flaws in many older analog tape recordings (SN ratio, audience noise, splices, etc.), they may in fact capture the musical information of the event, and therefore be quite enjoyable.

A poorly made digital recording, despite its superior specifications, may have left a lot (most?) of the music in the studio, and captured nothing but a hollow shell of the event.

The manner in which these recordings are mastered plays an equalling important role in the final product/sound. I have piles of CDs that I just can't listen to anymore as my system has improved. They just sound worse with every improvement. Of course the good recordings/masterings just sound better with every improvement.

Don't know how well the Meitner does, but I can say that it is not a truism that the better a system gets the worse badly recorded CDs sound. Though I also had this misconception, over the years we have found that, like everything else in this hobby, blanket statements of fact are rarely true more than, oh, say, 50% of the time.

This concern of how to build a system that allows us to play (yes, and even listen to) older CDs is one which we share - as we were young(er) and no smarter then than we are now at the time of the early 80s and so foolishly bought up new CDs as if they actually had the music on them that was displayed in the pciture on those tiny little pieces of paper showing through their often cracked and chipped plastic containers; this picture (and, as we came to discover, the music on the CD itself) often resembling in some lilliputian way the covers (and music) of LPs that we knew and loved. ;-)

Luckily, some tube digital seem to have a way of creating music out of too-few-bits and somehow do it in a way that is able to communicate the original feeling and instensity of the music. Luckily, it also helps that in a lot of the badly recorded music of the early to mid 80s, not a heckuva lot was really going on in terms of the complexity of the music (though, of course, there is also stuff like King Crimson, Frank Zappa, etc. are just plain hard to render on any system - no matter how good the recording is).

For example, we have found the Audio Aero Capitole to be excellent and making bad recordings sound decent, the Audio Note DAC 3.1x Balanced and 4.1x Balanced also, though slightly less so. It would seem that other tube CD players (like the Cary) and DACs (like the Zanden) might also do a good job (I have no extended experience with these regarding this matter of The Infamously Awful Sounding CDs).

This is not to say that solidstate digital is unable to render a bad CD in a listenable fashion - just that it seems that many do not (Levinson, Krell, Wadia, etc.) and do infact do as badly or worse than cheaper CD players.

Enjoy!
-Mike (Audio Aero and Audio Note dealer with lots of bad - and, yes, quite a few good, as well - sounding CDs)

Mike of Audio Federation,

You had me till the end of paragraph 3. Paragraphs 4 and 5 could have been condensed to:

“If we don't sell it, it must be crap.”

Congratulations, you have succesfully proven your initial deduction about “blanket statements.”