[earwicker7]

I've been following the debates between people who do and don't believe that all cd players are alike with quite a bit of interest. I've got to admit that both sides make some good points and I myself was undecided for a long time. However, that's all changed now.

Yesterday I received my Opus 21 with the Great Northern Sound reference upgrade. Having sunk $5,000 in this CD player, I was very worried that I might have been sucked into the hype of high-end equipment and purchased something that would make no difference in anything other than the size of my bank account. After all, there are a ton of people who say there is no difference between this and a $50 Walkman. It took about 10 minutes of listening to it to throw this idea out the window. I'm not going to use fancy audiophile terminology like forwardness, speed, and tautness (you know, those subjective terms reviewers from Stereophile use to describe why the $800 cable from Company A sounds radically different from the $850 cable from the same company

). It was much more simple--there were sounds on the Opus 21 that did not exist on my other CD players (or if they did exist, they were so buried in the muck that I never heard them). For example, I've listened to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" for 20 years. On the Opus 21, I heard something I've never heard during the 500+ times I've listened to the album--at the end of the last song, you can hear what appears to be bleedthrough from the band in the adjacent studio. If you had told me this last week, I would have asked you what kind of drugs you were on. Now it's clear as day. As I mentioned earlier, I'm trying to steer away from subjective terms, so I'll try to make this as objective as possible; prior CD players (X360. the one on my computer, god knows how many different models in the past)-->no bleedthrough, new CD player-->bleedthrough.

For a minute, I wondered if this was just because my Opus 21 could read SACDs (Dark Side of the Moon is an SACD). So I popped on Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth, another CD I know like the back of my hand that was not SACD. Again, details I've never heard were now screaming at the top of their lungs... subtle drumfills that I'd never noticed, the very soft scraping of a guitar pick on the strings, etc. Disc after disc and the same effect, which was hearing things I'd never heard before.

I know this isn't scientific by any means, but I'm flat out, 100% convinced that there is an ENORMOUS difference between low quality and high quality CD players.

Now that I know the "truth", I'm probably going to turn into one of those tweakers who listen for differences in cables

. Audiophile equipment, what have you done to me???

 

[HiWire]

Yup, high-end equipment is addictive. Those tightpurse naysayers may be richer in $$$, but they'll be poorer in eargasms.

 

[jonnywolfet]

i dont doubt that the cdp sounds awesome, but i heard the bleedthrough on my old sherwood hifi with crappy speakers years ago, isn't it a sample from a beetles song?

 

[Yikes]

Quote:

Originally Posted by earwicker7 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Now that I know the "truth", I'm probably going to turn into one of those tweakers who listen for differences in cables . Audiophile equipment, what have you done to me???

Don't waste your time. Everyone knows that cables don't make a difference.

Congratulation on the new source! You will quickly discover that we are capable of hearing things that they haven’t figured out how to measure; ……….yet.

 

[earwicker7]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jonnywolfet /img/forum/go_quote.gif i dont doubt that the cdp sounds awesome, but i heard the bleedthrough on my old sherwood hifi with crappy speakers years ago, isn't it a sample from a beetles song?

After doing some internet research, that seems to be a popular idea, but if so, it's a Beatles song that I'm not familiar with. I'm stumped, frankly.

 

[GANESHA]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HiWire /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yup, high-end equipment is addictive. Those tightpurse naysayers may be richer in $$$, but they'll be poorer in eargasms.

I agree that some high-end equipment sounds better than lower priced units.
However, some us cannot afford high-end equipment for whatever reason although we would like to own it. Perhaps we are tightpurse due to circumstances and not by choice. Please be more compassionate with
your choice of words.

 

[earwicker7]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yikes /img/forum/go_quote.gif You will quickly discover that we are capable of hearing things that they haven’t figured out how to measure; ……….yet.

I've come up with an analogy in the last two hours or so regarding this.

Let's say you're a crime scene investigator in the 1960s. You've got a blood sample that is not the victim's taken off the floor where a murder occured. You know that the victim was killed by one of five suspects, as they were the only people on the island where the murder occured. You do the bleeding-edge (sorry for the pun) technological thing for this time and get lab results on their blood type. Here's the problem... they all have Type A Negative blood. Since the blood is the only evidence you have, you have to tell the judge "Sorry, there's no possible way to tell who did this crime."

Now, imagine that someone told you that there was obviously a difference between the subjects' blood. "Nonsense," you'd say, "science proves that there is no way to tell the difference! Every sample of Type A negative is the same." Well, given the science OF THAT TIME, you'd be correct. But fast forward a few years and you've got a little thing called DNA testing that kind of changes accepted theories.

My point--science is a constantly evolving field. Something that we think we have pinned down can rapidly change in the face of new measurements.

 

[ccotenj]

well... you'd have a point... except that wave theory/acoustics/sound propagation have been understood and nailed down for quite some time now... it's basic physics...

i won't go so far as to say that stuff will NEVER change (never is a long time), but i'd bet my house they aren't changing in my lifetime... but if some of that stuff IS wrong, then a whole boatload of theories (and not just to do with sound) are gonna come tumbling down...

hey, if you "hear a difference", good for you... money well spent... it's only YOUR ears that have to be happy...

 

[JadeEast]

One of the great joys of chasing the good audio
dragon is when you hear something you never heard
before in a recording you know well.

A rythem guitar track thats so far back in the
mix that its almost silent or the fact that there
are 3 back up singer not the 2 you heard before.
You hear into the recording for details and elements
that seem new but were just lying waiting for discovery.

Our hearing is amazing and strange especially when it
comes to memory. Now that you've heard the new details
do you think that you could hear it with your old component
or is it just not able to resolve the detail?

 

[earwicker7]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ccotenj /img/forum/go_quote.gif well... you'd have a point... except that wave theory/acoustics/sound propagation have been understood and nailed down for quite some time now... it's basic physics...

Look, I don't want to give you the idea that I think science is bunk... it's always the best explanation that we have at any given time. But don't think for a second that people 100 years ago working with everything they knew didn't think they had everything nailed down. I took a physics of sound class in college and everything I was taught still holds to the best of my knowledge, ie, nothing that I know of has been directly contradicted; however, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the discipline has expanded and there is something that is considered a given that wasn't when I was taking the class.

To get back to my previous analogy, the jump from blood type to DNA testing did not contradict blood typing or make it irrelevant. In the same vein, I think it's naive for anyone to consider that nothing new will ever ever be discovered in the realm of the physics of sound. New discoveries do not necessitate anything about today's theories being inherently wrong.

 

[Wmcmanus]

Congrats! I think good equipment makes music sound better too. The naysayers can shoot me if they want to.

 

[lextek]

I rediscovered the importance of a "high-end" source over the easy library access of an iPod. Clean window.

 

[HiWire]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GANESHA /img/forum/go_quote.gif I agree that some high-end equipment sounds better than lower priced units. However, some us cannot afford high-end equipment for whatever reason although we would like to own it. Perhaps we are tightpurse due to circumstances and not by choice. Please be more compassionate with your choice of words.

I wrote tightpurse naysayers (generally, those who consistently deny hearing any differences in equipment, because they don't want to, e.g., my dad)... my home system is based on a Discman source. Almost everybody on Head-Fi would like more $$$ for our hobby. I'd also love to have enough money to build a reference speaker system, but that dream isn't coming true any time soon either.

 

[krmathis]

Congratulations!
In my experience high-end equipment have noticeable higher grade of sound quality, in a way that I can justify the higher price tag.

High-end equipment sure is addictive!

 

[kool bubba ice]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GANESHA /img/forum/go_quote.gif I agree that some high-end equipment sounds better than lower priced units. However, some us cannot afford high-end equipment for whatever reason although we would like to own it. Perhaps we are tightpurse due to circumstances and not by choice. Please be more compassionate with your choice of words.

This is what I learned. If you want to buy something expensive you usually can..With in reason. I work
at BB & bought almost 3 grand in Audio thanks to Headfi..(took me a yr) I just saved ALOT.. I'm sure there is a guy thats makes twice as much me & says it's too 'expensive' to buy.. Bottom line. If you want something bad enough, & is in your reach money wise, you can obtain it...Even if it takes yrs..

Yeah.. a 60.00 CD player is as a good as a 1,000 player

What ever it takes to save people money..