CD sound quality

Rich,

If you are looking to get back into vinyl on a budget I would look for a used "Logic" table. One helluva lot of table for the money. They are quite a bit better sonically that the VPIs and way better than the Regas and they cost $200 when you can find one. Most people that bought them keep them.
Also, there are guys that add a suspension to the old AR turntable and it becomes essentially a Sondek. Throw the AR arm away and put a used Grace 707 on it and a Koetsu Rosewood and you will have a no joke audiophile rig that will run with the best of them for about a grand (and $800
of that is cartridge) The old Supex 900 is the forerunner of the koetsu and is even cheaper and sounds great.
I have info I can send on the AR and Logic turntables if you want.
Hope this helps.

Ross

Thanks everyone for these very helpful comments.

Let me be more specific about the sound quality. Specific instruments/voices almost sound as if they are in another room. The sound is never totally muted; that would be a setup problem or device failure/defective hardware. Itzak Perlman’s violin is missing treble. Removing the bypass and turning up treble all the way helps the instrument sound more normal. Of course, its preferable to keep the bypass and the music engineer’s balancing. I did a similar test with a Metallica CD and bass also seemed too distant. Turning up the bass helped a little but quickly muddied the sound of course…

The tuner actually sounds good, though since I have no control over radio broadcasts I cant specifically compare and re-listen to specific sections of music. This cuts out any problem with the CD player and I assume sound quality should be high with the tuner since the only loss of sound quality would be with speaker cables (Oehlbach – 4mm(?))

Could the combination NAD/Wharfedale be less favorable for certain types of music?

I have the most basic cables to connect the Amp/CD player. Before spending $500 on a new CD player, perhaps a small investment in those connecting cables could make a difference?

Cheers

Bonvoyage,

I don't think this is a cable issue. What you are decribing sounds like a defective circuit somewhere. Since the tuner sounds normal, I'd look first at the CD. Does your Receiver have another jack you can run the CD through? AUX 1 or 2 maybe? Do you have another CD player at your disposal; a buddies maybe that you could try.
Don't think that just because it makes sound it can't be defective. I listened to a Bryston Amp for several years before I convinced myself something just wasn't right. I sent it back to Bryston and they said one of the output transistors was shorted internally!!! It was an amazing difference when I got it back and naturally I felt like a tin eared idiot - And I've been listening to audio for 25 yrs.
This doesn't sound like a compatability or cable issue to me.

Ross

This may be something of a hijack if you don't have a PC. However if you do then there is something you can do to drastically improve CD sound. First, pick up a newer used higher end universal player (I picked up a Pioneer Elite 59avi on Ebay for 500 bucks and you can get them cheaper than that). I rip my CD's to PC using Exact Audio Copy (free download) then burn them to DVD using Cirlinca DVD Solo (35 bucks) at either 24/96 (two hours to a DVD) or 24/192 (one hour to a DVD). The sound improvement is substantial. In fact the Pioneer reads them as DVD-Audio discs and outputs both analog and digital (to my NOS tube buffered DAC). Also look at controlling vibration and RF/EMI on the transport.

Direct PC audio (playing sound files from your PC to your system via Squeezebox, etc) is the next step from this. I'm just waiting for it to mature. It's getting close. With terrabyte home hard drives coming soon storage is not a problem. Using FLAC (a lossless encoder) you can compress audio files to fit large numbers of them on current hard disks.

Regarding vinyl, after attending HE2006 and hearing many systems featuring it I found no compelling reason to go back to it. Having to buy new vinyl (the audiophile pressings run upwards of 30 bucks retail) and hardware while ignoring or trying to sell my 2,000 CD's and digital front end makes no sense. Vinyl is having something of a renaissance but to me it is still a dead end. You can rip your CD's and upsample them to improve their sound. PC audio eliminates the biggest digital problem (transport error and jitter).

Plus, digital is far more convenient. If I want to sit back and listen to 2 hours of music without getting up every 20 minutes to flip a disc I can do so. If I want to listen to "Deacon Blues" fifteen times in a row I can do that by pushing a button. Yes, you could go back to cassettes but then you need a high end deck and high quality tapes to make ones that you can enjoy but still fall well short of good digital.

To each their own. Hope this helps.

Bonvoyage - I think Rrcpa gave you the right steps to try next. Try changing the path to see if you can isolate which part of the path is causing the problem. The way you're describing the problem doesn't sound like a typical compatability, or even quality, issue.