Is the CD player dead?

I think people assume lossy when they read the word "compression". Lossless compression means exactly that - nothing from the original uncompressed audio is lost. Having said that, there is an overhead, computationally speaking, in playing back a losslessly compressed file, which I suppose could in theory impact sound quality.

-- Ian

 

I must admit to being a little overdramatic about the differences between formats, in my limited experience I have rarely detected a difference although I am aware that most of these discussions seem to centre around what the layman would consider minute differences but audiophiles would call vast. Maybe it sounds less emotional cus all your doing is clicking a mouse. Get the smell of vinyl and cardboard into your nostrils.

 

My Meridian 507 plays discs at 2x speed.

 

Dvd rom drive anyone?

 

For me there is more than the music to this hobby. I lot of it is the pride of ownership, its nice to have music, too have vinyl, to have graphics and to pay for an artists work properly.

I love the medium of MP3, and use epitonic and such like quite often but it does not compare to thumbing through the CDs or finding that record you forgot you had, this simply cannot be recreated on a PC (or even a mac, snigger)

I have thought very seriously about getting a G5 as this has audio digital out, connect to a dac and then the hifi and jobs a goodin, but I would still want the CDs there for my perusal. 10000 songs all in the same font in aphebetical order does not do it for me, and I frequently find myself going to the same few tracks when using the mac as source.

I think it is fair to say however that CDs as a medium will die out, it simply has to.

Sometimes I am frightened by the acceleration of technology, I think youth today seriously risks losing what music is really about. Its a package, its a library, not a bunch of 1s and 0s on a computer screen.

 

Is that what the screen on a Mac shows? I'll stick to my humble PC.

 

I must admit, I guess I am one of the "yoofs" that Gary talks about, I cant be bothered with CDs anymore, initially it was a hassle ripping them, but I got a DVD burner now, and can use the technologically superior to MP3 musepack format, which sounds great to me, and burn dozens of albums on a single disc as backup, as well as having any album at my fingertips to me. I can understand that this is not what everyone wants, but personally, I love it, and I would NOT say it reduces my appreciation of music, like what he said, but all this IMHO.

 

Gary,
Get a soundcard with a digital out instead. I think you have a G4 tower? If so (or a G3), no problem.

 

Yea but Joel, the trick is I tell the better half only the G5 can do this, do you understand?

 

Yamaha CDR-HD1300

Been waiting for the price of these to drop for about a year (they started at £600). Noticed in Hi-fi World that Sevenoaks are now selling them for £470 so I bought one yesterday morning.

It's an 80GB HD recorder (standard IDE, any disk up to 140GB can be swapped in), with built-in CD writer. Digital and analogue inputs and outputs. You can use the inbuilt CD player to digitally rip directly to the HD, but it does implement SCMS, so any content ripped to the HD digitally can only be subsequently digitally transferred to a CD-R/CD-RW a single time (not the most onerous restriction, but it does mean it can't be used to make bulk copies, not something I bought it for anyway). Best of all, it doesn't compress the digital stream at all. (Sony have something similar, but it looks like it only makes ATRAC copies, and Richer Sounds sell an even cheaper device that will only store MP3).

Basically, it's a PC designed to work as an audio separate. I couldn't be arsed to sort out a laptop for this kind of stuff, and for £470 would be hard-pressed to put together something as good. The immediate reason for buying it was because, thanks to penance, I now have a tape deck to use to digitise a pile of tapes I've had for years, something I've wanted to do for ages. The prospect of making analogue CD-R copies of all this stuff was a bit daunting, but this thing is great - I've just left it going all weekend, feeding the tape deck tapes as required, and, once everything's on the disk, I'll be able to chop the files up into individual tracks, edit out the gaps where I forgot to turn the tape over in time, and make digital copies to CD from the HD of the stuff I want to keep, at my leisure.

It's an excellent thing, and playback from the HD is really very good. (Currently listening to Rise Above by Epic Soundtracks, recorded by me circa 1991 onto tape from a NAD TT and it sounds great, apart from a bit of wow at the end because the tape was a bit suspect). It's also dead quiet in operation, no intrusive disk or fan noise. The control software is, by necessity, pretty complex (it's an extremely flexible device, with lots of record and edit options) but very easy to pick up.

I'm dead chuffed with it. Has a timer as well, for kicking off those all-important digital recordings from Freeview of Jazz on 3 and Mixing It on Friday nights. Brilliant. Best recorder I've ever used. Given that I have a multi-room setup and now have the capability to store up to 120 hours of music, I suspect this may get more use than the CD player...

-- Ian

 

Right. I have my set up errr... set up.
All Naim with Shahinian Arc speakers.
Really crap room.

Whoever it was earlier in the thread who wanted to do a listening test between the CDX and the Computer/Squeezebox/Flac/Arcam Delta Black Box 5 set up is very welcome to come round to my house in Brighton. It'd be really appreciated if you could bring a reasonable DAC.
If you were an expert in setting up Naim gear that would be handy too (as i need to check I have got it right).
Bring CDs of choice too.

Regards
MC