Comment by patates

2 days ago

Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?

13 comments

patates

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JohnFen  2 days ago

> all about the DAC, no?

Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.

  • blibble  1 day ago

    it's surprising difficult to rip from audio CDs in a error free manner

    most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches

    • TheDong  1 day ago

      Just use a tool that supports the AccurateRip database or similar, and check your checksums, right?

      Like, ripping seems easy to me, you rip with something that supports a checksum database, and if it comes out with a correct checksum then it's right.

      1 reply →

    • JohnFen  1 day ago

      Huh. I've never had a problem with that, personally. Maybe I just got lucky with my tools.

    • The_President  1 day ago

      I archive CDs continuously with a workhorse of an external unit from 2010 and it converts a full album audio disc to 320kbps VBR MP3 in like ten minutes.

      Only issues come from damaged retail discs and dead burned ones.

torginus  1 day ago

I've had a bad experience with this just a couple years ago. I have an old DVD/CD player which at some point I realized I had no way of connecting to my new TV. The old one was a decent looking premium unit, that I got from my parents (who paid good money for it),

The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left to differentiate, and everyone started selling absolutely nasty plasticky junk.

The new Sony unit I got was a loud rattly garbage, that even though it did the things it needed to do, made such an awful noise that I had to take it back. The other one I got (don't remember the brand) was no better.

I took that one back too, and I shelved the issue, but it was kind of remarkably terrible experience for me.

  • mlrtime  1 day ago

    Why not look online and get a "hifi grade" older used one?

    Is it a budget issue or sound quality issue?

  • runarberg  1 day ago

    Generally DVD players make lousy CD players. Most of the annoyance is in the UI which is optimized for watching movies, not playing CDs. But there are also sometimes problems like a small buffering pause between songs, etc. which you don’t get with quality CD players.

    I say this as my primary CD player is actually a Panasonic DVD player from the year 2000. This is the exception that proves the rule. At the turn of the century many quality DVD players were sold and marketed as primarily CD players with the added capability of being able to sell DVDs.

pavon  1 day ago

How common were HiFi CD players without DACs? My recollection is that S/PDIF never really caught on that much so output to the amplifier was almost always analog.

  • einr  1 day ago

    Mid range/high end CD players almost always have both analog and digital outputs and have since some time in the 90s at least, so I’d say quite common.