On 24/01/2016 13:38, Phil Allison wrote:
RJH wrote:


I've got a quite expensive Harmon Kardon HD970 CD player with a facility
to use it as a DAC. But it has trouble with some discs nowadays. I
gather from a brief internet search that the simplest solution is to
swap out the mechanism.

I've never been that convinced by optical media - far from the 'perfect
forever' we were asked to believe.


** The phrase "perfect sound forever" was used in relation to the release of the CD disk in 1982. Nobody suggested that CD players would have an indefinite life.

Nevertheless, I still have Sony CDP101 that was purchased in May 1983. It is the only CD player I ever bought and it still functions and tests perfectly.

I also have any number of CDs that are of similar age and they all play perfectly, same as the day they were made. Same is true for every CD I own.

I'd agree on the retail music and data CDs. But not on writeable, and
certainly not rewritable. Quite a few of mine from 10+ years back can't
be read, and they've been stored in reasonably good conditions.

On hardware, maybe I've been unlucky and bought badly, but I seem to
have experienced a high number of computer and audio CDP optical drive
failures.

I was glad an optical drive wasn't fitted to a recent iMac I've bought.
I got an external drive for the few times I might need it. That's
generally OK, but seems very picky about cables for some reason.

Any shortcomings in sound quality from a CD is not the fault of the disk or the 16bit/ 44.1kHz PCM format - but rather the recording industry that still only gets it right on occasion.


Yep.

--
Cheers, Rob