Unniversal Players suffer due to the following:(saved from notes)
John Atkinson made a statement concerning DVDP's being poor for the use of Redbook CD's. I ,along with some others I have talked with have had the same impression of these players,but the reason for poor performance was never addressed until JA mentioned that the "master clock frequencies required by MPEG
video decoding are very different from that required for CD playback".
I bought a DVDP recently which no way came close to the performance of my much older Philips CDP.
My question is what DVDP's that are out there do not have this problem. If there are DVDP's that do not have the capability to play MP3's will that allow to by-pass or eliminate this problem.Put another way what should one look for? No MP3 Capability?
Those that are serious about what they use generally dislike MP3's and feel it's a step back for audio ,but use DVD's in HT setups. Would like to know what there is for alternatives that will not degrade redbook playback while allowing the player to also have DVD capability.
Hope I phrased that correctly!
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The JA post is copied below
John Atkinson 19:45:32 07/03/04 (15)
In Reply to: Stereophile & The Absolute Sound Critiques of DVD Players posted by Welly Wu on July 03, 2004 at 18:53:27:
> have read in both
Stereophile and
The Absolute Sound > that the editors think DVD players do not make for outstanding
> Compact Disc players in general
for technical reasons. Might
> I inquire specifically what those technical reasons are? What is it
> specifically that John Atkinson is talking about?
The problem is that the master clock frequencies required by MPEG
video decoding are veryy different from that required for CD playback.
So, with the majority of the DVD players I have examined, their
noise floors when playing back CDs are contaminated with enharmonic
rubbish. In the worst case, this reduced dynamic range to less than
14 bits' worth, ie, audible degradation.
The best DVD-based players, like the Ayre D1x, the long-
discontinued California Audio Labs CL-20, and the Linn Unidisk did
not suffer from this problem, but are/were/are not cheap.
I have just received the Toshiba 3950 I said I was buying, and will
be putting it through its technical paces in the next couple of days.
Happy Independence Day (my first as a US citizen)
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
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This is my first post here in over a yr. as I have been out of this due to personal reasons.
