"There are a number of potentially irritating limitations on that device for a home device, the display is small and there is the file/folder limits (900/90). Technical performance is actually slightly inferior to a decent budget CD player on most parameters "
True the display is small; however at 6ft away I can't make out the display of my CD and DVD player anyways. The QA-350 does come with a remote, which makes it a truly viable option for home use compare to most portables. It is after all a SD based device, I don't find the file/folder limits an issue. You will run into the 32G SD card storage limit rather than the file name limit.
Uncompressed wav runs ~ 10mb per minute so a 32GB card is ~ 3200 minutes , if they were 3 minute songs you would get ~ 1066 - so it may be a limiting factor depending on genre, but probably not, I was thinking of MP3 files, my error
You can swap out the SD card just as easy as changing a CD.
Agreed
My QA-350 sound quality is on par or superior to my high-end Pioneer Elite SACD/DVD player, so I can't see how it is inferior to the any budget CD player.
The claimed performance of the QA-350 is bang on par for a late 80s or early 90s multibit oversampling CDP, SNR> 100dB; Distortion <0.005%, THD + N : 0.009%, my old 1989 RCD855 was a tad bettter on distortion/noise (0.0025%) and as good on other parameters. The $350 Marantz CD5004 has measured performance much better than that, and your SACD player should be far superior !
Also by extracting the files from the CD in advance using Exact Audio Copy software (free), you are doing a much better job of correcting for any errors on the CD,
CD errors are really not an issue with any half-decent modern CDP, bit-error rates are so low nowadays you get ~2 inaudible uncorrected errors per CD
and doing it well in advance of playing. When playing, there is also no mechanical intervention or noise added to the listening environment.
Fair point, From 6ft away mechanical noise should be inaudible, I normally sit pretty close to my listening sources, I have owned some slightly noisy CD players and DVD players I'll admit, but others that were silent at 18" or more, the quietest player I owned was a Yamaha mult-disc jobby that was silent to within 6" - but with headphones on most external noise is cut out, but yeah a noisy transport is annoying !