"Bob Latham" wrote in message

In article ,
Arny Krueger wrote:
"Trevor Wilson"
wrote
in message

It's well over 200UKP. Why does it sound better than a
Sony £30 DVD player?

**Send me the schematic of your 30 Squid Sony and I'll
tell you. The HK has a number of significant technical
details which, IMO, make it sound better than all the
cheap players (and most of the expensive ones) I've ever
heard.

I thought that all named CDPs sound identical
nowadays?!

**I suggest you do some listening. You may well be in
for a shock.

If you listen with a salesman in attendance, or after
reading the usual ignorant hype in one of the high end
ragazines, or if you speak with a friend who has spent
stupid money on a high end optical disc player, then you
may well hear better sound from the more expensive
player. That's the major problem with sighted
evaluations - you never know why you perceive what you
may think you perceive.

All CD players sound the same.

Nope. The CD player function of the typical computer CD ROM drive (output
via an analog output) is probably so flawed that you will hear a difference.
Portable CD players, particularly the ones with non-defeatable electronic
skip protection, are often so flawed that you hear a difference. An old CD
player with dried-out electrolytic caps (I've got a Sony like this) can be
so flawed that it sounds different. Any CD player that doesn't track certain
kinds of CD well, particularly CD-Rs, will sound different.

CD players have analog outputs that range from about 1 volt RMS to 2.5 volt
RMS, and unless you address that situation they sound different. If you
don't do a near-perfect job of time-synching the two players you compare
within about 10 milliseconds, they will sound different. If you listen to
one player and then move the disc over to another player and listen to it,
you will remember their sounds differently, because of the difference in
time since you heard them, and they will sound different to you. The first
few generations of CD players had DACs that had considerably different
frequency response, and they sounded different from each other.

Is there any time scale to this?

Hmm, for the last 10 years, any reasonably competent CD player would have
been very difficult or impossible to distinguish from any other or the
ideal, provided you did a far more careful comparison than just about any
audiophile ever did.

I have not compared CD players since around 1990.

I have done carefully-done comparisons from time to time up until just
recently, and the two long paragraphs above catalog just about every
difference I have ever heard.

At that time most CD players to my ears sounded pretty
grim and the Meridian 207 and 208 were the only players I
had the opportunity to hear that did the job at all well.

Compared to vinyl or analog tape, just about any reasonable CD player, even
either of the two first-generation models, did an absolutely stunning job of
reproducing music.

If the popular wisdom here is that even then they sounded
the same, then I need to find a new group to read.

I can virtually guarantee you that unless you are among the few dozen people
in the world who have done a technically near-perfect job of comparing CD
players, every CD player you've heard has sounded different.

If you do that technically perfect job of comparing CD players that are good
modern optical players, just about all of them will sound alike. Thing is,
you might easily find a $39.95 DVD player in your collection of modern
competent optical players that sound alike. Certainly, if you competently
compare just about any 2 ca. $100 optical players, or any of them with a
good high-end player $1,000, they will sound very much alike.

The genesis of CD player sound quality is that while each of the two first
CD players on the market could be distinguished from each other in a really
sensitive listening test. But, either sounded very good by any reasonble
standard, if just a tiny bit flawed. In the second generation, there were
several pairs of players that could not be distinguished from each other or
the ideal, they were that good.

By the time we did the CD player listening ABX tests that were published in
Stereo Review in the late 80s, I recall that only the legacy first
generation player could be distinguished from the rest. But, they were a
pretty august group - no utter cheapies in the list.