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Originally Posted by PhilS /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Could you expand on this a bit and provide some specifics in support of your assertion? It seems rather hard to believe.
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There has been a shift from bespoke CD mechs towards DVD mechs in recent years presumably driven by the fact that fewer are being made.
Linn for instance have replaced the transport on the Ikemi with a noisy plastic Sony DVD transport on their Unidisk. Meridian use DVD transports even on their redbook-only players whilst Shanling have bought up stocks of NOS Philips swing arm pro mechs to use on their statement machines because they presumably believe they are superior.
In short the computer market now drives the industry and dedicated audio mechanisms are not being made anymore apart from by a very few manufacturers like Teac.
It could of course be argued that adavnces in error correction mean that any tracking errors introduced by less heavily engineered mechanisms can be fixed down the line, but it could be countered that this has an influence on sound otherwise why would Teac, who of course build CD and DVD mechanisms as well, bother with a high end mech like the VRDS for their Esoterics.
Compare this state of affairs to 15 years ago when Sony threw all their R&D behind building the best possible transports for high-end discmans to minimise read errors, before RAM buffering was a workable proposition.
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Originally Posted by PhilS /img/forum/go_quote.gif
In the context of the present discussion (i.e., whether there are audible differences among CD players), this seems to be internally contradictory, but maybe I'm missing something.
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There are of course audible differences between CD players and that's not contradicted by saying that a well engineered player from 15 years ago is necessarily going to sound inferior to a more modern machine purely by virtue of the fact the latter was made more recently.
There are many ingredients going into what makes a CD player good and all of them can influence the overall sound of the unit. Some areas have benefited from improvements in technology, others like transports have deteriorated.
Of course economic factors play a huge role in this. In the 80s CD players were a luxury item which were much more expensive per se. Multibit DAC's were expensive to produce and that kept prices high for most of the decade.
In the 1990s when Philips came up with Delta Sigma DACS, the prices tumbled and CD was ready for the mass market.
However many designers like Marantz's Ken Ishiwata felt that the earlier technology still had a lot to offer to the higher end of the market which is why Marantz started the move back towards multibit in the late 1990's and why chipsets like the Philips TDA1541 are still popular today.