jphalter@ihuxb.UUCP (10/08/83)
A few comments on the state of the CD art:
1) CD players with 14 bit D/A converters do not have an inate 6 dB penalty
in signal-to-noise ratio. Two distinct types of D/A conversion exist in
the CD markey today. The Philips decoding technique uses a 14 bit D/A
converter and 4-to-1 oversampling to extract the digital information from
the disc. The sampling rate for 14-bit machines is 176.4 kHz, rather
than 44.1 kHz. The Sony decoding technique uses a 16 bit D/A converter
and samples data at 44.1 kHz. (Yamaha uses something completely different,
I hear)
2) The audio dealers I talked to all claimed that the machines their
competition was selling sounded completely inferior to the machines they
were selling. To my ears, most of them sounded pretty good (but not the
same) I only ran across one machine that I considered inferior to the
others. (For fear of lawsuit I won't say which) The biggest differences
between machines were in the range of features offered. My main
requirement was that the machine I bought must have random programming
access for the tracks on the disc. (I mean I wanted to play track 2, then
track 8, then track 1, etc.)
3) Note: The following information represents my personal opinion based
on the culmination of all experiences since birth. (Disclaimer ends)
I selected the Kyocera machine and am extremely pleased with it.
Its error correction circuitry (14 bit Philips) seemes to work very
well when when commared to some other players. Typically, I can hear
1-2 brief dropouts per disc. These dropouts (milliseconds) appear to
be random, are not repeatable by playing the spot over again, and
occur on a clean disc. (Many players are much worse, especially when
the discs are not clean)
4) I haven't had a problem with CD availability in the Chicagoland area.
At present, the largest disc selection is at Laurie's Records in Des
Plaines. They have about 500-600 titles and substantially more pop/jazz
CD's than everyone else combined. (They seem to import directly.)
Right now they have more CD's than I'm willing to buy and seem to
receive new titles daily. I've seen a price range on CD's of $16.50
to $24.95, where the 16.50 was in Milwaukee on some Classical CD's
and the 24.95 was for some japanese imports.