On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 16:58:44 +0000 (UTC), Jay wrote:

Ian Molton wrote in
:

Probably makes very little difference - a CD player mechanism is dirt
cheap these days (like, sub 5UKP probably). All the rest of the money
is divided between markup and the digital-analogue electronics.

The question is what do you want it for?

If you just want a better CD source, give your cheapie to someone who
hasnt got one or something, and buy a new CD player.

If you want to get nice digital sound from a PC or have multiple
digital sources, buy a DAC.

Be warned though that only a very few companies produce good DACs (ie.
that outperform the ones in CD players).

My ARCAM Delta Black Box 3 sounds good to me, although I suspect the
high end modern DACs in expensive CD players beat it.

Meridian appears to be 'the' name in DACs currently, and their design
(to all intents and purposes) eliminates jitter (which the cheaper
DACs dont generally do so well. Their output filtering is apparently
good as well.


Ah, I see.

Well, I'm going to keep my DVD player, and was wondering if I could get
an old DAC for £100 - £200 whether it would ourperform a CD player for
the same money.

either way, I'll keep the DVD player.

But you reckon that it would be just as good getting a CD player?

cool. I'll look into it.

j

If keeping the DVD player then I would recomend you spend as much
money as you can afford on a decent CD player. This will far
outperform all but the VERY expensive DVD players on CD replay.

I'd go with a decent second hand ARCAM CD player off eBay.

As for taking your DVD player into an external DAC for DD or DTS, its
going to make no difference in quality. Both formats are compressed
and error corrected so to lose quality, you'd have to have a VERY bad
transport. What's more important here is the transport of the DVD
player, not the DAC at the other end.

Ray.