Is the CD player dead?

m/c,
one word.... jitter. pc's are not noted for their lack of electrical noise and jitter is completely irrelevant when reading data from hard drive. jitter is a killer for good sounding audio.
cd players range from 50psec to about 3000 psec of jitter a computer drive would be at least an order of magnitude above that, i guess.
unless you dac had some anti jitter buffer (dac 64) or was able to demand data from the drive under a single clock control (clock link, dcs, wadia, et al) then your hard drive will not sound so hot.
i'm not saying it's impossible but at present i doubt you'd get as good a sound as a decent dedicated transport.
the problems aren't insurmountable and with things like wi-fi and bluetooth the possibilities of having a genuine multimedia server off in another room storing all your video and audio are very exciting however if you are interested in quality then i doubt it's going to cut the mustard in the long run (at present). i suspect though that there are a number of companies working on this and that the paradigm for music delivery will change drasticly in the comming years.
cheers


julian
 
If it can be proved that you can get the exact 1's and 0's to a DAC from the CD using lossless files then it must follow that the audio reproduction quality has the potential to be better than a dedicated CD player.
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Read the thread that PeteH pointed you to (it's long, but worth it), and you may have pause for thought about CD players and error correction.

I have no issue with lossless audio stored on hard disk, and I suspect the days of mass-market music being released on physical carriers are numbered. In principle I don't see why it must sound worse than CD, although, equally, I don't believe there are any in-principle reasons why it must sound better either. Often it does sound worse ATM, and when it becomes a mass-market technology the record companies will insist on digital rights management of one form or another, and, probably, differential pricing for lossy and lossless versions.

Playlists? Inconvenience of CDs? Dismissive of vinyl? Don't listen to records all the way through? I'm guessing you're in your early 20s...

-- Ian
 
Thanks for the last two posts (sideshowbob & julian2002). This is exactly the sort of response i was hoping for and does show up the weakness in my argument.

Two things though
1) I am only talking about the digital domain. There is not point at all in mentioning vinyl in this thread.

2) You are completely wrong about my age (but i am strangely flattered!). My frustration with CDs is due to my recent conversion to audiophilism (??). For the last two years I have been listening almost solely to MP3s.

To domfjbrown. You have not noted that .flac is a lossless format (unlike mp3 etc). The .flac format compresses a wav file (the CDA files on a CD is a wav file) by about 50%. When uncompressed the flac file gives you back the *exact* wav file. There is no loss of information whatsoever.

It may be worth noting that .flac files are a great way to back up CDs if you are at all worried about them becoming damaged or loosing them. A 200gb disk (£150+VAT??) will hold about 600 CDs.
Using Exact Audio Copy, a reasonable CD burner (i.e. Plextor), and good quality CDRs it is possible to produce a CD that cannot be distinguished from the original.
 
Originally posted by Robbo
Are you sure about this? It might be worth doing some comparisons.
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Surely not. Just trust your ears Robbo ;)

Anyway, for record companies, and especially for artists, the net promises to be a liberating medium (although I hope it doesn't liberate them of a livelihood).
HD audio and video is coming, the days of spinning silver discs are numbered (but not, ironically enough, the large black CDs).
 
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"Is the CD player dead?" The simple answer is of course no :) .

On the compilations front I'm with Michael. A good album should IMO not merely be a collection of seperate tracks, but something produced from start to finish with some sense of flow. Compilations obviously have a place, at a party say, but most of the time I listen to whole CDs. For classical music the whole cherry picking of tracks idea is also of rather limited merit ;) . Oh, and I don't find CDs a hassle BTW.


Martin
 
Come on guys, lets stop blathering about the "logical reasons" for and against why it may or may not be better.
The key point is simply in the listening. Lets just get a bake off organised to try this out. We can debate about the reasons for why we prefer one option over the other AFTER we've got the findings.
 
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I have to say I've never been that impressed with MP3 as a format due to two major reasons.

1. Is the sound quality doesnt cut it for me. Its just a personal thing. Dont try to argue about high bit-rates. I dont like the sound of it full-stop, sorry.

2. PRIDE OF OWNERSHIP! I love having my library of CDs on my shelf. It looks cool to have racks of cds all lined-up. I like to browse through my collection thinking "hmmm what shall we play...." I enjoy it when people come round to visit and they stand looking through the shelves saying "never heard of most of this!"

I could never be proud or excited by looking at my PC or harddrive. A collection of scrappy data files just isnt cool.
 
For me the argument doesn't really lie in the quality of the sound. Obviously there are huge differences in quality between playing music through MP3 or CD and more so if you include Vinyl. But music is about a lot more than just hearing the sound. For me the experience of a piece of music starts when thinking about buying itââ'¬Â¦.encompasses shopping for the album, taking it home, sticking it on, reading the sleevenotes, appreciating the artwork and finally slotting it onto the shelf until next time. For me the CD is a compromise to some extent as I feel greater satisfaction looking at a double gatefold vinyl album than a CD case. CD's are a halfway point between vinyl and storing music on a hard drive. You get something solid to handle and a sense of ownership but this feeling is increased with Vinyl because the packaging and format are works of art alone before you hear the sound. To have something on a format such as ipod or hard drive you miss out on all this. Theres no sense of satisfaction.
Martin C is dead on with his comments. 'Greatest Hits' or collections just seem so soulless. This is best illustrated by Bob Marleys workââ'¬Â¦get yourself Legend, you get a kind of disassociated collection of MOR tunes. Get Natty Dread or any other album and you have a little slice of a body of work. Albums are like books, you may not like some chapters but they're all important in the overall story. Simply sticking your fave tunes on a format takes away all kind of feelingsââ'¬Â¦.. after a while you don't want to hear them againââ'¬Â¦they become bland and over familiarââ'¬Â¦if you look forward to hearing it on an album you get the rest of the storyââ'¬Â¦or digging it out of your collection makes it more worthwhile. Clicking a mouse is missing out a big portion of the enjoyment of playing a tune
CD will not die because it's a nice formatââ'¬Â¦not as nice as vinyl but its about the right sizeââ'¬Â¦easy to useââ'¬Â¦.you can fit some good artwork into the book and sleeve. Its handy and relatively satisfying! I've seen the pics of peoples listening rooms on this forumââ'¬Â¦.who wants to hide their collection away in a little anonymous box?! Show it off!
Sorry for the ramble!
HM
 
We are not really talking about MP3s. We are talking about lossless file formats that sound *exactly* like the original CD. MP3s have many obvious advantages over Ds. Unfortunately the cost of all these advantages is sound quality. I would not be listening to most of the music i listen to know if it were not for MP3s and the Internet... and i wouldn't have bought anywhere near as many CDs!

Space is cool, clutter is not. and I need room for my new speakers! The sooner I can consign my stupidly large collection of CDs to a cupboard or (even perhaps the loft) the better.
 
"Space is cool, clutter is not. and I need room for my new speakers! The sooner I can consign my stupidly large collection of CDs to a cupboard or (even perhaps the loft) the better. "



Thats a shame really. A lot of people did that with vinyl and regretted it.

Plus I dont fancy it when you have to pull them down from the loft due to hardrive failiure.;)

Makes me shiver.
 
Originally posted by PumaMan
Plus I dont fancy it when you have to pull them down from the loft due to hardrive failiure.;)
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That's why you buy a motherboard with RAID support and make sure you have mirrored drives.
It's all well and good having a PC without mirrored drives, as it's possible to keep the important files backed up to CD and easily recover it.
Once you're into LARGE data storage like music servers, multiple drives with failover capability seems like an absolutely essential function.
 
Originally posted by Mr_Sukebe
That's why you buy a motherboard with RAID support and make sure you have mirrored drives.
It's all well and good having a PC without mirrored drives, as it's possible to keep the important files backed up to CD and easily recover it.
Once you're into LARGE data storage like music servers, multiple drives with failover capability seems like an absolutely essential function.
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Quite right, but we all know how many dont think that way.
 
Interested to know what the *HUGE* differences are on a well encoded MP3 in comparison to the CD (that question mainly aimed at Heavymental). I'll grant you there are differences, but to call them *huge* when its likely to be fairly hard to tell them apart in reality is being just a little overly dramatic I feel. But I understand that they are not in the spirit of this hobby and respect that, especially considering MP3 is a very old and outdated format anyway.

I'm not after another of these arguments, but I do find it highly amusing how people say there are such huge differences, when I find the differences at most, pretty small (probably more difference between interconnects, TBH).
 
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I'd say the difference is huge! Even on high bitrate mp3's. It is not something you notice when first listening though. to me it seems to be more like a lack of atmosphere and emotional involvement.

Why doesn't anyone make a CD player that plays the disc at say, 4 speed (still very very quiet) and then it will have time to re-read if it misses something. CD ROMs all have a small buffer anyway and so the information can be taken by the DAC at the correct speed. Obviously the drive will stop reading now and then to let the buffer empty out.

My only guess why, is that it doesn't make any difference!

I believe mini-disc works a bit like this. If you listen you can hear it read then stop then read then stop etc..
 
Originally posted by Tenson
Why doesn't anyone make a CD player that plays the disc at say, 4 speed (still very very quiet) and then it will have time to re-read if it misses something. CD ROMs all have a small buffer anyway and so the information can be taken by the DAC at the correct speed. Obviously the drive will stop reading now and then to let the buffer empty out.
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Let's repost that link that PeteH pointed out above...

http://www.zerogain.com/forum/showt...p;threadid=3017
 
Originally posted by Tenson
I'd say the difference is huge! Even on high bitrate mp3's. It is not something you notice when first listening though. to me it seems to be more like a lack of atmosphere and emotional involvement.
Click to expand...

Hmm, that doesnt tally with a fairly recent blind test I performed on some audiophiles. Only one managed to guess correctly, and they all felt there were *small* differences. I cannot believe some of the things I read sometimes, it just doesnt seem to add up to me. I think some peoples ears are not as good as they think they are ;)
 

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