newman (03/15/83)
The duke of denet somewhat missed my point when commenting on my statement that all CD players will sound essentially alike; his point about the shortcomings of the analog side still being there are of course correct, but that has nothing to do with my statement. All I said or meant was that if you take two CD players connected in a given system, there is not much point in A-Bing them for sound quality, naturally assuming they are operating correctly and aligned properly. There was another article that said that some CD players drop the two LSB's out - I find that hard to believe, because of the heavy dependence on word length for quality D/A conversion; the current word length (14?) is minimal to keep cost down to the point where people will buy the things. Can you name players that do this? I'd like also to toss in my two cents on the Telarc 1812 "torture record". The only cartridge that I'm aware of that can track the cannons is the Shure V15 V, and maybe the IV. (Not the plain vanilla Telarc; there have been ultra-fi JVC pressings that are even more extreme). I think the quote "If you can track those, your system is a real winner!" incorrectly equates cartridge performance to the tracking of HIGHLY unreasonable groove excursions that are found on only one disc. The peak velocities found during the cannons are enough to cause many fine cartridges to mistrack badly, but I would hesitate to dismiss the performance of these cartridges. Let's be realistic - no matter how good cartridges get, cutters can probably be made that will produce an untrackable groove. This is another problem that conveniently goes away with CD's. Cheers, Ken Newman
jeff (03/28/83)
An interesting article in BILLBOARD for 3/19, about the North American Philips (NAP) CD press conference held on 3/7, noted that the NAP (Philips, Magnavox) player is 14 bits, and will cost $800. Another article notes that the Denon (nee Hitachi) CD player will not be marketed now. Jeff
jeff (04/01/83)
Sony has announced a new CD player in Japan, the CES-701, for Y260,000 (about $1100). This unit, which has 5(five)5 built-in microprocessors, allows direct keypad input of the location on the disc where play is desired. Also, the dynamic range is up to 95dB (vs. 90dB claimed for the CDP-101) and the separation is at 90dB (vs. 60dB, I think, for the CDP-101). Now, weren`t we really all quite satisfied with a d.r. of 50dB (on the outside tracks) and a separation of 30dB for analogue disks? jeff