Many people here have no idea how to buy a CD player. You hear all kinds of crazy things from the LLM bots trained on Audio Science Review, but they're mostly wrong. There are three important things to consider when buying a player. The mechanism, the DAC, and the supporting circuitry and output stage.The best mechanism is the Philips CDM series, CDM-0 and CDM-1 being the ones with the most longevity, and heaviest build. Pioneer also had a great mechanism for a while, where you put the CD in upside-down. But it's impossible to find parts for now, it was rare and only in super high end equipment.DACs (the chip, not the integrated device) make a huge difference this is something the bots deny (many will try to sell you shitty garbage instead). The best DACs are long out of production now, or cost $100+ just for the chip. There are very very few high end DACs on the market now. Just a handful. Burr-Brown makes a high end one, Crystal makes one.Best older multibits:>PCM65>PCM1701>TDA1540>TDA1541S2>AD1862>D20400Best older single-bits:>PCM1794>TDA1547>SAA7350GP>AD1955>SM5865>CS4303>CXD2562>MN64735>PD2028>WM8741>YAC507Of course the final component in good sound is the output stage, careful construction of the device to minimize jitter, possible reclocking of the signal, etc. You can just tell if a CD player is worth a shit 90% of the time, if it's light and cheap feeling, it's probably garbage. Not always, but usually.
DACs make a big difference. I have several albums where different DACs fail to reproduce a sound. One track from DMX Krew's You Exist has a relatively quiet dot matrix printer taking the part of hi-hats. I own this album on CD and vinyl, and on the vinyl the dot matrix sound is very audible. OTOH, different DACs are all over the map. I have a Parasound P5 preamp, which has a built-in USB DAC, a Burr-Brown top end one, and it reproduces the hi-hats just fine. However, a leter Pioneer CD/DVD player / burner I have, fails to reproduce this and it sounds like hi hats. I have another Pioneer Elite Laserdisc player with the SAA7350GP, it reproduces the dot matrix sound perfectly. My Sony DVP-S9000ES also reproduces it perfectly. An older Panasonic MASH CD player I tried can't reproduce it. And finally it comes out muddled on an old Sound Blaster Pro when playes as a WAV file. Not hi hat or dot matrix like, just kind of a fwoomp sound.So don't let anybody tell you the DAC doesn't matter, that bullshit. It might not be audible to the average person, especially with music they don't already know well. But this can be measured and heard.
>>110114575>Audio Science Reviewworst audio site in the entire web. Full of dweebs who THINK they know about "audio science", yet they have a superficial knowledge of science thus have no real clue on what measurements are important and which are not, which features are important, etc. Land of the clueless.
>>110114575Newer models are slow to load CDs, and can't handle de-emphasis. The only decent modern option that I know of is the Tascam CD-200, but haven't used it personally. I've got some mid90's sony.
>>110115349They have dry earwax, that's 50% of the problem.>>110115388They also barf if there is the tiniest scratch. Early players can read right through scratches. Philips mechanism ones anyway. Many CD players won't even mute on glitch even if they track after they hit a defect. Best way is sample and holding the previous sample before the error and continuing when the tracking restarts, it's usually just one or a handful of samples that get damaged.
>>110115388>Tascam CD-200I only looked at pics but it appears to have a bog standard modern plastic transport. The optical pickup does look pretty nice though, it reminds me of many 90s cd players.
i bought a cheap modern onkyo and its fineim surprised it doesnt have any antiskip at all, but whatever, it works as a CD player
>>110114575it's just digital data. Just buy a chink external optical drive + a decent DAC and that's it. It's not even VHS or cassettes or vinyl where the stored analog signal complicates everything.>inb4 rotational velocidensity
>>110116008Yeah but you have to read that digital data in, and most CD drives fail at that basic task unless the disc is in pristine condition and the player is brand new. A year later they'll be unable to read the disc if it has the slightest scratch, two years later they won't read anything.Meanwhile my CDM-1 transport unit from 1983 can play a disc that was cracked in half and duct taped together.
>>110115945>im surprised it doesnt have any antiskip at allWhy? Everything has gotten shittier. Onkyo was owned by Sony for a while, and produced some high end stuff. But then they got sold off, it's like Florida weirdos from Israel running it now.
>>110116147but you have cd players not even following redbook standards... I get build quality etc being worse than the peaks of Japanese made electronics, but really? Often missing gapless, de-emphasis handling etc.
>>110116377I wouldn't touch anything made post-2010 myself. Unless it was real audiophile-grade shit that I somehow grabbed for a song, or broadcast/studio players.
>>110116649You mean post 2000. That's when they started adding all sorts of weird copy protections, that got so bad that CDs were not allowed to keep the Compact DISC logo on them on account of not being compliant of the standard.
