[Sugano-san]

I would be interested to learn what you guys think about the following:

In the area of stationary (home) CD players, it appears to be undisputed that most older ones are not as good as new models at the same price point, or in other words, today you can get for considerably less money a quality of sound that was considered excellent many years ago, and the sound quality of players at the highest end of the market seems to improve steadily.

While there may be good arguments to buy 2nd hand CD players, which used to be at the very high end of the market many years ago, most commentators seem to agree that technological progress has in general improved the price/quality ratio of stationary CD players and continues to do so.

Example: http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showt...threadid=36139

However, in the area of portable CD players, the trend seems to be the exact opposite of the above -- the sound quality of portable players seems to decrease over time; hence older portable players, at least some models, have become real collectors' items, as we all know, and precisely because the sound of such older players is said to be substantially better than the sound of today's models.

Examples: all over this forum

On the assumption that the foregoing description is more or less accurate: This development seems to be absurd, in particular in light of ongoing miniaturization (more functions on a single chip than ever before), technological progress in the fields of semiconductors (e.g. mixed-signal), data processing (e.g. upsampling), etc. I for one fail to understand the reasons for it, especially given the fact that portable and stationary CD players are such close relatives.

Would anybody like to share their views on this? (Or challenge my assumptions?) I am looking forward to reading your posts!

 

[CD44hi]

I personally think that at manufacturers have decreased the sound quality in the newer PCDP in order to maximize the running time while using batteries. I guess the focus has been to produce units with multi-format capabilities that would satisfy a general population wishing an "all-in-one" performer. I guess R&D along the lines also decided that a decrease in sound quality either: was not going to be noticed by the general population or that truly, in order to keep the standard high, and present the "modern" capabilities would result in a prohibitely expensive player.

I agree with you that this whole development would seem mainly irrational given the technological progress in the last decade or so. But I guess, it is not "how good can we make a product," but "what is the profit margin and how many can we sell" that determines the manufacturing trends.


Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter Sugano-san

CD44hi

 

[PeterR]

Sugano-san, I completely agree. Home CD playback has improved enormously over time, especially in the last 5 years or so. In contrast, the best sounding PCDPs seem to be very early 90ies, and if you believe Duncan, even the very first one can more than still hold its own today. If you listened to an early home CD player today (my mother still has a Philips CD100 in her kitchen system

, it's all in the genes) you'd be amazed what they tried to sell to us as 'perfect sound forever'...
Why? What sells is stylish looks, long battery life, minutes of antishock... Sound quality will appear very far down the list, if at all. The target audience just doesn't care about quality (and probably has never experienced it either). We're just a small group of nutcases here, nothing you could base a business of Sony dimensions on...

 

[Gojira]

The sound quality of portables seems to have followed a very uneven course. First of all, only Sony and Denon seemed to be able to manufacture a good sounding portable CDP at all. AFAIK, all of the other manufacturers never succeeded in this and probably never even tried.

Sony is an interesting company from a historical perspective. They have taken a lot of chances with some rather strange and niche products in the past. To me, the Solar Walkman always represents this idea to me. And, of course, we can thank Sony for starting the very idea of portable music with headphones. It is actually a very Japanese concept if you think about it.

It seems that in the early 90s they managed to figure out how to make portable CD players sound very, very good. Perhaps they were just seeing if they could do it. I wonder if there were a group of audiophile types in the engineering dept for portable audio at that time, who for some reason, lost their power over design decisions in '93.

The biggest problem with spending design resources on making a portable sound good is headphones. A good pair of headphones is generally too expensive to sell with the unit, and without good phones, most of the beautiful sound is wasted. I mean, is there any point in making an Ipod sound any better than it does when most people wear the stock buds or whatever headphone is most fashionable at the time. We are a very niche market.

I suspect that Sony realized this and just accepted that if they wanted to innovate they had better focus on attributes other than sound. Things like size, style, and battery life. Actually the fact that ultra long battery life ever became an issue in portables seems a bit bizarre to me. As usual Sony shows the world that they are good at what they want to be good at. If you listen to stock headphones, then a D-EJ2000 really does make sense. I mean, have PCDPs ever looked this cool?

It does seem a bit strange to me that home audio never really followed a similar kind of course. I mean, those "micro" systems never really became dominant. Sound quality seems to have remained the focus in home audio.

 

[skagen]

Gijira,

I agree with you that the obsession over battery life is out of hand. Current levels, they are way over what 95% of people would really need.

However, I think it is possible that skip/anti skip has played a role in the degradation of sound quality. That was the big achilles heel CD portables for the longest time. I'm sure that the designers believed (possibly correctly) that this was they key factor holding them back in terms of consumers' adoption of the product.

However, all the manufacturers seem to have adopted compression-based solutions - with consequently negative side effects on sound quality and positive side effects on battery life.

 

[soundboy]

Sugano-san,

I agree with your observation. I think the people who obsess over sound quality in either portable or home component CD players are in the extreme minority; 99% of the people out there just don't care. Just look at the number of people who wear their headphones backwards. Products are build for a certain price point, and as long as they sound better than AM radio, 99% of the regular consumers will be OK with that. The proliferation of Best Buy, Circuit City, and Good Guys stores aren't helping either.

 

[daniel422]

The degradation of PCDP output quality is almost purely a function of economics for the given application. It works the same with all portable devices -- including your cell phone. By their nature, PCDPs are designed to be portable. This means small form factor and long battery life are the primary goals. NOT sound quality. They are not designed to be sit-down audiophile units, but out-and about units where you're going to be subject to a fair amount of noise to begin with. That's why sound quality is not given higher priority. Now as things get smaller, they use less materials to make and (for the most part -- I'll admit a certain level of diminishing returns here) therefore are cheaper to make. This ABSOLUTELY holds true for the headphone amp ICs in PCDPs. Less silicon = less cost. Always. Unfortunately, making things smaller presents its own set of problems -- thermal issues, coupling problems, etc. This leads us to the headphone amp ICs we have today: ultra-small chips that cost 10-20 cents (and those are the GOOD ones!) that really aren't any better (in most cases worse) than what was made 10-15 years ago with higher quality (and cost) discrete components.
The same thing is already happening to cell phones (yeah, you can laugh at me now). I predict this first generation of mp3 capable cell phones to be the best sounding for quite some time. Pretty soon (like in the next year or two) all audio fucntions will be consolidated into one IC (there are already many companies selling ICs like this). The DACs (voiceband and music), amps (handsfree and headphone), and filters will all be on one IC. Putting DACs and amps in one IC is never a good thing for sound quality. And wait until the class D amps get in there. Do you see what I'm talking about? It's all about how small can they make it and how long can the battery last. Audio quality is practically an afterthought.
The world is not filled with audiophiles, my friends. It is filled with people who are quite satisfied with the tinny, severely bandwidth limited sound that emits from the telephone and TV speakers they listen to. I can only hope that all this integration and development along these power/cost lines will someday again result in fine sounding portable units. I just think that's going to be many years in the future.
Until then, get a real CD player for home use and be happy with your PCDP on the road where it's intended. Unless you care to make your own (or mod an existing one -- no small feat sometimes) there's no use moving this mountain.

 

[blip]

Class D amps? Are those the PWM kind? Creepy.

Anyway, I think that part of the issue is that much of the sound quality improvement in stationary CDP has come from improved DACs... As daniel rather compellingly showed this kind of digital overhead (which draws extra power) is not in the interest of mainstream PCDPs.

While we're on the subject... which do y'all think sounds better... an old CDP or a new (fairly decent say iMP-400 or something like that) PCDP?