skipt@inuxi.UUCP (M Tourville) (01/24/85)
I am finally ready to seriously shop for a CD unit. Can someone tell me or point to an information source which identifies: Which players use oversampling (and how much) and which ones don't? Which players share a single d/a and which ones don't? Has anyone ever found a dealer that could answer these questions? Thanks in advance Skip Tourville inuxc!inuxi!skipt
rfg@hound.UUCP (R.GRANTGES) (01/24/85)
[] Answer to first two questions: read recent (last 12 mos) Stereo Review. Answer to third question: I haven't, but many have represented themselves that way. THe essence of the sales technique is to make the sale, not to impress the customer with what a good guy you are. THis is interpreted by all good salesmen as, "Lie as required. Don't let your lack of information show." -- "It's the thought, if any, that counts!" Dick Grantges hound!rfg
stewart@ihldt.UUCP (R. J. Stewart) (01/26/85)
[I sent mail to Skip telling him what I'd found in shopping for a CD
player. I thought it might also be of interest to post it.]
RULE #1: If you ask dealers about equipment they don't carry, they will
tell you anything that will get you to buy their equipment. I
found that this ranged from unsupportable opinions to outright
lies. If you know a good dealer, you might be able to trust
them to stop short of lies.
RULE #2: If you ask dealers about equipment they DO carry, they will
often give you an incorrect answer. I think this is due to
ignorance rather than dishonesty, because a couple of times I
was told things that made the unit seem less attractive than
it really was.
I wondered why dealers who seem generally competent had such a hard time
discussing CDs. I came up with a few reasons.
- CDs are new. While people that have been in audio for a while know
quite a bit about analog, they know little about digital. When some
dealers found out that I knew some things about it, they started
asking ME questions. In one shop it was told "In digital recording,
they have a number for each frequency, and a number for hiss, and
they just throw out the number for hiss."
- Feature overload. While all amplifiers are not the same,
they all work basically the same way. Each CD player has a dozen
different features, and any particular feature is accessed in
different ways on different players.
The bottom line is: don't trust the dealers word, find it out in a real
description of the product. I would either use magazine reviews or a
manufacturers spec sheet to look up things like oversampling, filtering,
etc. The October issue of Audio magazine has a great overview of the
specs of players available at that time.
I'll give the conclusions that I came to while shopping around. These
are personal opinions, of course.
- I found no real sonic difference between filtering methods. While
a friend of mine claimed to be able to hear a difference when they
were played side-by-side, he didn't feel like either sound was better
than the other. In particular, I could not detect phase shift
between channels (common with analog filters), even with headphones.
- I found no significant sound quality difference between players of
different price levels, above a certain threshold. The really
cheap players ($300 units with all the programming features) were
inferior in their reproduction. In side-by-side tests, though, I
could not say that a $1200 Revox was better than a $550 Luxman.
- Features make a big difference in price; decide in advance which ones
you want to pay for. In the Luxman line, for example, the full
featured unit listed for $1000, while the basic unit lists for $550.
As far as I could tell, they are the same except that the basic unit
lacks remote control and programming features.
I ended up with the priority list that follows. For each player, I
would weigh each area and then compare the results to the price
to see which deck was the best value for me.
1) Error Correction - Discs are pretty durable, but they do get
scratched. Some of the decks I auditioned failed to play
discs that were not (visibly, at least) badly damaged. Failures
included missing sections of music and inability to access tracks on
the disc. I decided whether a deck passed this test based on magazine
reviews; the reviewers have special test discs that reveal how robust
the error correction is.
2) Resistance to vibration - I didn't consider this very much when I was
shopping around, but I realized how important it is when I got mine
home. My initial player was defective, and would detrack when people
would walk across the floor. Talk about annoying! It sounded just
like a record skipping.
The replacement is much better, but I'm still surprised at how easily
it will detrack when you hit it on the top. I looked back at the
reviews on the unit, and both reviews said it was one of the best
they had tested in this respect. If this is the best, I'd hate to
see the worst.
3) Features - Units that passed the first two criteria all sounded great
to me. I further narrowed the field, then, by ruling out decks with
too few features. At this point I looked at prices.
4) Access Time - This might be used as a tiebreaker if the difference in
access times is large. Access times of more than about 4 seconds is
annoying; some players have a maximum access time of 15 seconds.
So the deck I got? The Yamaha CD-X1. I almost decided to wait for the
CD-X2 (coming soon), but the X2 only has 9 (random) program selections, so I
decided to go ahead with the X1 (which has 23 sequential selections).
I'm very pleased with the sound and features on this deck.
Bob Stewart
ihldt!stewart