"Eeyore" wrote in message
...


I HAVE heard bad CD players such as the original Sony CDP-101. It souded
'harsh'
to me (one can speculate over what casued that) and I was convinced that
reverberation was being truncated (although that could have been the
result of
flawed mastering).

As a result I didn't buy a CD player until ~ 1989. A Denon DCD-1710 which
sounded natural. I still have it. There seems no point in upgrading since
it
works fine plus its build quality is the kind of thing one is never likely
to
see again outside of esoteric hi-fi.

I also have a decent Panasonic DVD player. I honestly can't tell it apart
from
the Denon.


There is little doubt that some first generation CD players were pretty
crap, due to a combination of poor monolithic 16-bit DACs (poor linearity
due to the difficulty of ensuring that the weight of each bit was *exactly*
half that of the one before over the full range), time errors due to using
one DAC time-shared between the two channels (which created problems if the
outputs were combined for mono reproduction) and all-analogue "brick-wall"
reconstruction filters with poor phase response.

These problems were significantly reduced in second-generation players with
over-sampling, and pretty much eliminated in modern players with "1-bit"
converters. The distortions created by modern DACs are similar in nature to
those created by analogue systems such as amplifiers, and very significantly
lower than those created by analogue disc or tape.

David.