[JLM]

TCG,

Please state your opinions more clearly.      

Your vinyl/DVDa proposal reminds me of the philosophic question of the audiophile on the island given a choice between great system with a handful of worthy recordings or a crummy system with unlimited number of recordings.  I'll always pick the later and strive for a system that allows me to enjoy to the maximum the widest range of music even if it means giving up the nth degree of resolution.


eric,

Thanks for the heads up, that does look close to what I'm after (price, age, quality).


GHM,

The glaring flaw of my Sony is the lack of coaxial output, so hunting for a cheap DAC solution is made a bit tougher.  Looks like a pre-amp is the first order of business and I'm still trying to do all this within some semblance of a budget, say $1000 - 1200 for good tube pre-amp and cheap optically fed DAC.


Thanks to all for the help.

[PorkpieHat]

Your vinyl/DVDa proposal reminds me of the philosophic question of the audiophile on the island given a choice between great system with a handful of worthy recordings or a crummy system with unlimited number of recordings.

There is nuthin' but barely adequate CD players at any price.  The technology is just not up to snuff - 16/44.1 is not adequate...nor is 24/48 enhanced recordings.  They are all hopelessly flawed...

I am going to disagree with you both! Not all CDs are created equal. Give me an EMI Classics CD produced after about 1990 and a good CDP and I find the sound to be pretty fine. If you want further evidence, listen to the various versions of Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" - say the Columbia CK64935 (terrific) as compared to Columbia CK40579 (average). I am not going to say it is a good as DVD, but, like JLM, I find the other considerations simply too compelling.

I personally made the choice some time ago to stick with CDs - more versatile (I can go to a computerized system if I want), greater availability, less cost. But I have learned that the quality of individual CDs is something that needs to be taken into account. Interestingly enough, price is not always a good indicator of quality. Naxos CDs usually have great sound quality at only $7 a pop and many of them are rated very well by the Penguin Guide..

[TheChairGuy]

Hey guys,

I'm not ditching my $4500.00 CD front end, either, as I own 300+ CD's and it has made CD listening time as enjoyable as can be.  But, the point is, it only makes playback as good as possible...but CD is flawed from the recording process.  No matter what is done, all I am doing is trying to make my CD's sound musical.

Whereas vinyl, and to a slightly lesser extent DVD-A, is musical/organic from the start...and you can get startlingly pleasing sound for more money.  They both start off on a higher level of resolution/organic wholeness/truthfulness of timbre than CD.

Tho the offerings are still small in comparison to CD, I think it the absolute best digitl format yet devised.  If you look thru Music Direct / Acounstic Sounds / Elusive Disc catalogs...you'll find hundreds of titles available. There is a huge number of classical pieces in this medium...precisely the worst musical genre to show off CD's attributes.   I cannot bear to listen to classical on CD...it is reserved for vinyl only (and now DVD-A).

There's been a tremendous growth in the number and quality in the last year of DVD-A titles. The universal player is one of the reasons, but the main reason is that artists, producers, and consumers are enjoying the fantastic sound quality, bonus material, and surround sound.

 

I am not certain (I'm no technophile, merely competent), but a 24/192 or 24/96 DAC should be compatible with any DVD/DVD-A/CD player...offering the playback of all, yet will downmix DVD/DVD-A to only two channel stereo in ultra-high resolution and organic wholeness that only this digital format can provide(the way I listen to it; I think my head might explode in 5.1 or 6.1  )

Go buy a cheapie Pioneer or other DVD/DVD-A player, a toslink or digital cable and a good DAC....you'll have it all this way.   

[boead]

JLM,

There is nuthin' but barely adequate CD players at any price.  The technology is just not up to snuff - 16/44.1 is not adequate...nor is 24/48 enhanced recordings.  They are all hopelessly flawed - there simply is not enough storage on that medium to get all of the music...but there is on a DVD disc.

Buy a good DVD/DVD-A/CD player and get a few dozen new DVD-A titles.....Cambridge, NAD make 'em and all three formats are good...but DVD-A shines because it is better from the start.

No slight to anyone of you that has invested large bucks and time in CDP (myself included), but the technology of CD just ain't musical - burdened by low storage it is mastered with heavy hands at the control board; DVD-A discs can be recorded straight out as there is more room to store it all.  DVD-A has much of the musicality of vinyl in a much more convenient format...bettering CD, even at cheapo price points for players, by a city mile.

My experience with SACD was not satisfactory either....it's high frequency production is tragic, actually.

Anyhow, good luck any way you go on it       

What DVD-A or SACD Player are you using?

I have a Denon DVD-2900 and its ok. SACD sounds best, then DVD-A then Redbook but I got to tell you that my Arcam Redbook players sounds much better to my ears, on my system then SACD’s (I have about a dozen equivalent SACD/Redbook CD’s).
I’m sure its not the format that’s better, I understand the differences between the formats but the implementation isn’t even close and the end result is superior (more musical) presentation from my Arcam’s Redbook.

When shopping for a player some time ago I listened to a number of players and didn’t like ANY of the upsampling CDP’s. I found them to lack musicality but gain detail in a not so pleasing way – these were fairly high end players too.

Also, from what I have gathered there are no consumer CDP’s that can output HiRes data from either SACD or DVD-A due to copyright issues (there are some propriety system but they are few and far between), Universal CDP’s simply truncate the data to Linear PCM 16/44 for offboard decoding (digital out). This means that the native player is solely responsible for converting the HiRes Data. This means that a Universal Player actually has to have/be multiple players in one and the cost can be high and/or one format will be compromised.
There is simply not enough SACD or SACD titles to keep my intrest no less make the switch.
Maybe things have changed, I stopped following the HiRes rollercoaster over a year ago.

[boead]

I am not certain (I'm no technophile, merely competent), but a 24/192 or 24/96 DAC should be compatible with any DVD/DVD-A/CD player...offering the playback of all, yet will downmix DVD/DVD-A to only two channel stereo in ultra-high resolution and organic wholeness that only this digital format can provide(the way I listen to it; I think my head might explode in 5.1 or 6.1  )

No, it doesn’t work that way.

The MSB Gold Link III upsamples Linear PCM 16/44 to 24/96 via a Crystal CS8420 sample rate converter, I believe.

If you are using the MSB to decode from DVD-A then you are converting the HiRes data on the DVD to Redbook PCM 16/44 and then upsampling it to 24/96 in the MSB – the last thing in the world you are hearing is the HiRes DVD-A and all the ‘organic’ nature is just a byproduct of the upsampling which can be achieved with regular Redbook CD’s.
About upsampling, its really a horrible thing but if implemented with care it has the theoretical ability to sound different and maybe better but you can’t make gold from silver so upsampling is just a algorithmic way of interpolating data to make more then what was originally there! It’s a process done in visual 2D for many years and the results has never been all that great. I’ve not liked what it does to music and won’t buy an upsampling DAC.

DVD-A and SACD are proprietary formats that require special converters all of their own to preserve the HiRes data. In theory SACD is superior in many ways and more expensive to produce. This also means that each format should be handled in its own dedicate circuit so if a universal player can play three formats, it basically has three distinctive circuits inside that share a common transport and power supplies.

[TheChairGuy]

Thanks for the layman-compatible explanation of all this, boead  In my particular case (I think you were citing my specific CD playback system with a modded Sony transport and Gold Link III) I have the upsampler built in to the transport (a $600 upgrade from MSB at the time).  So, my transport outputs 24/192 into the DAC (I believe, at least).  I've heard scads of non-OS DACs...I've not found one that compares to Steve Nugent/Empirical Audio's work on my upsampling and oversampling system. He seems to have optimized a theoretically problematic issue into better than non-OS end result. 

Just my humble opinion, of course, but I am as happy as one can be with my CD playback here...but it pales next to DVD-A (even with my garbage-y video system I play it on) in several important regards.

My recent journey to the more promise filled digital land of DVD-A was chronicled here: http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=29307.0

I have heard that most universal players implementation of DVD-A is inferior to (generally cheaper) DVD/DVD-A/CD - only players.  It is, perhaps, one format too many to sound good in the universal players? 

[Haoleb]

For $500, I would look for a good used Rega Planet 2000. Maybe the Channel Islands passive controller along side?

I second that, Picked one up for myself a few weeks back to replace a Cambridge D300, Pretty good improvement. From the reviews I had read online before buying i was almost expecting a night and day difference. Well it wasnt, But the most cd's I listen to im actually hearing things that I just plain didnt hear before. And the smoothness and natural sound this player puts out is probbably its strongest feature.

I actually picked up a spare laser pickup because I plan on keeping this one around a while

[JoshK]

*i didn't read much of this thread...just thought I'd throw in one suggestion in case you hadn't considered*

Word on the street is the Esound player is good...it looks like it is a brick SH....don't know if you need a whole player or just a dac. 

[JLM]

Thanks to all for the responses. 

I just sent a money order off to hartwerger for the Njoe Tjoeb 4000 he posted on the Trading Circle.  It has a decent volume control and will introduce tubes to my system.

I expect to be back in the audio PC waters evidentually (when it gets friendly for lazy computer dorks like me).

[Scotty]

Having had the Njoe Tjoeb 4000 in my system for evaluation for a while I can say I enjoyed it's presentation. It did however exhibit lower resolution than my reference player and it required the use of an after market CD disc stabilzier to be used with it to max out it's resolution capabilities and clean up some residual low level grunge.
It was always musical and did not sound like the typical tube based player.
It did not have an overly warm presentation with rolled off highs and a bloated bass. It's only other error that I noticed was that with it in the system PRAT
took a hit. Not a big one but you would not want to have two components with the same level of error in this direction the system or it would go over the threshold of acceptable error into sloowwssville. A Django and a Njoe Tjoeb 4000 in the same system is an example of what I am refering to.
Scotty