"Signal" wrote in message
...
"Keith G" wrote:

Actually, more seriously, I'm looking at an Arcam CD73, an Arcam A70
amp...and possibly some B&W 603 S3s. Can't stretch to anything fancy
like a tuner.



I didn't write that - it was the OP....



I got all my stuff used. JM Lab Electra 905 for £500, Primare A10 for
£150, Marantz CDP for another £100.
Cheap at retail £2k (SQ vs price) ... a gift at £750

http://translate.google.com/translat...3Doff%26sa%3DG

I always suggest buying used if you have the smarts.. there's plenty
of good-as-new gear available at 25%-50% retail if you look around.



Once I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly, but not everyone wants
secondhand and there's an awful lot of dreck out there atm, especially at
the lower end of the market. The grubby black 80s/90s gear with the busted
remotes is turning up in the shops (from what little I see of it) and the
good stuff goes on eBay!

I think it's worth mentioning that the OP appeared to want a smart/matching
stack (a lot of people do) - I merely pointed him to an impossibly cheap
stack of quite smart and really quite clever brand new kit for less than
secondhand prices and dropped the hint he should spend the bulk of his
budget on a decent pair of speakers. Mid-fi electronic gadgets change year
on year (for some obscure reason), but a good pair of speakers is
*eternal*.....




Hifi electronics are a done deal these days, you really can get a
perfectly
good DVD player for 20 quid!! (Silvercrest from Lidl's a while back...)
Quite what some suppliers are providing for kit costing 10 times the price
(and looking only a wee bit better) I really couldn't guess!

Quality of components, design, attention to firmware, materials and
parts used, quality control..? Perhaps put together by people being
paid a fair wage?


That one doesn't wash with me - there's hardly a 'name' now that don't get
its stuff built in China (where the purported 'sweatshops' are) and some
'respectable names' have been doing it for years. As far as the 'slave
labour' bit goes - I'm sure they are not being forced to work at gunpoint
and I suspect they would rather have the option to work than not. Normal (if
not ferocious) economic development will sort things out eventually, in any
case...???



Three mates bought the same "bargain" does-it-all ALDI DVD player over
the christmas period... all three went back. One was rejected because
the internal subtitling was yellow one pixel wide lettering with no
background border, so nigh on impossible to read over light
backgrounds. Another rejected because the USB socket doesn't work
(design fault - none of them work, something is bolloxed) and the
third because it stopped recognizing discs. One of the buyers is
techie, said there were problems with anamorphic playback too...



Sure, not all cheap stuff is good. It's a case of Caveat Emptor, as always -
there are plenty of forums giving useful FB on the cheap stuff and I gather
they are not averse to calling a product a POS if it's justified. Unlike the
'magazines' of course.....



I doubt any budget DVD player is sonically on a par with a decent
current mid range player. Trevor Wilson can probably give a technical
explanation for this.



Oh, I'm sure he could, but if I can't personally distinguish between two
pieces of kit then it's academic AFAIAC and if a twenty quid player only
lasts so long, then that's OK too - the last thing you want these days is a
bit of kit lasting forever it seems!!



The CD player
is the least impressive of the 3 bits of kit but it was utterly
*indistinguishable* from a ********y Marantz 'KI Signature' ubertweaked
CDP
I already had, when the Marantz' internal attenuation was used to
level-match the output. Not one person (in about half a dozen that heard
them both here) could tell them apart and I was able to switch between
them
seamlessly, once I had 'time aligned' them. (Not hard to do...)

IIRC Marantz' internal attenuation is _not_ clean. The SQ certainly
seems to degrade on my Marantz CDP even knocking the internal level
down a couple of notches (compensating volume with the amp of course).


Whatever

The important thing to take into account is that I already *owned* both
pieces of kit - nothing in it for me if one was (or wasn't) worse than the
other. It's no hardship to get rid of spare kit these days - asitappens, I
flogged the Marantz and it virtually paid for the Argos stuff!! :-)