s/h cd player for £1500

The Audioworks has an Accuphase DP55v for sale (on ebay too). Used to be mine, and is smashing.

 

it must be i'm a black sheep again, finding 840C quite boring and uninviting and not vinyl-like at all.

 

Well thank god for that

You might be interested to know RobHolt and I recently tried recording the Sheffield Steel album from his P9 and AT cart to his laptop at 96KHz/24bit (external audio interface). Played back though the 840C as DAC it was as close as indistinguishable from the actual vinyl. Make of that what you will.

 

Does anyone have an 840c that I can have a listen to, ( North London ) I have been trying to as many dacs /cdp's as I can, within a broad price spectrum, always interesting to hear the latest forum 'favourite'.

 

scientific enough for me, although i assume that a close result has to do a lot with a processing you've implemented. i would personally prefer a comparison of the same title of vinyl and CD - with the equipment you've chosen.

i've done that - and even with a top DAC as my altmann could be, results are far from what i'd love them to be.

kuzma stabi 1 (the first generation from mid-80s, with roksan artemiz and micro benz mc gold special edition left a digital rig deeply in dust. the recording used for test was DG release of karajan conducting beethoven's 5th with berlin philharmonic. the whole session left me in total disbelief and the only component i may suspect it was favourizing digital was the lowther speakers.

there is something totally unnatural to me with a digital playback whenever i have a chance to compare it with a good analogue. this is probably yesterday's news for many, but i don't use my turntable very often as i stopped buying records 20 years ago and i can't get into it again - here where i live a supply is bad (actually there's hardly any unless i do a mail order as back in the days) - so it always leaves me speechless to get reminded about inferiority of digital.

good analogue somehow focus music right in the lower mids, as i hear it in a concert hall, while digital shifts it more towards upper mids, making it sounding processed and artificial, no matter how 'organic' it may sound without a comparison with analogue.
as i said before, the only thing left to do is to avoid this kind of comparisons, it's only a headache you can have from them

 

Anu Hi, I always compare vinyl and cd copies of the same record, after I bought my TW, AC, I really believed that vinyl was way out in front , but I have heard a couple of dacs that come incredibly close and have the depth and life of vinyl, ( I still think vinyl is best ) but cd can come mighty close. Keith.

 

We had done that as well, the Sheffield Steel CD vs. the vinyl. It was close but the vinyl sounded a little more fluid and natural. Though I would be happy with either of them.

Given our results from the CD vs. LP and all the similar comments to yours above, this begged the question - was it a limit of the digital playback format and equipment or of the different mastering of CD vs. LP?

So the natural way to test that was to record the vinyl to digital and play it back through the CD players DAC section. The A/D was done via my PreSonus FireBox (not the best A/D but not shabby either).

The result was a digital recording that sounded exactly like the vinyl. So it strengthens my view that 'digital' is not to blame, indeed it records what you put in, its the mastering (and re-mastering) of CDs that is poor and lets them down comapred to vinyl. And god damn those uber compressed masterings we get today.

We did the recording at 96/24 since both A/D and D/A are capable of it but a quite test at 44.1/16 (CD standard) also produced an extremely similar sound to the original vinyl.

I also have to say I am mightily impressed by Robs AT cartridge. It is dead quiet in silent parts, no crackles or pops and the sound is crisp, clean and neutral. Not much of that 'vinyl colouration'!

Oh, and I didn't do any 'processing' to change the sound (well not for the test, we had a bit of fun later on!). Just input from the phono stage, record, and out again.

 

I'd throw away the player then and get somethin that allows you to enjoy your discs! Not discs that allow you to enjoy your player!

 

No chance, because the right CD production on it sounds like vinyl, only without usual funny disturbing pkcssss! schosssssss! and similar , what you get from the LP

 

But if the rest of your music collection becomes good for only the bin, then is that really worth the compromise?

Unless you can afford (and be bothered with), a second player that'll allow the rest of your music to shine, i'd ditch the player myself.

 

you must be having a really bad deck...:MILD:

 

Hi there, what took you so long?