(Reprinted from issue 59 of UHF Magazine. To purchase the issue, click here. Or click here to subscribe to UHF)
Testing CD Players
Yes, we are once again reviewing CD players. But why?
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The Compact Disc is less than two decades old, but it is showing its age, and it is under siege. A lot of people are asking the inevitable question: does buying a CD player still make any sense?
The threats to the CD are obvious. On the mid-fi side, the ubiquitous cassette lies bleeding, replaced more and more by dowloadable music from the Internet. MP3 quality is not worse than that of most cassette decks, and in many ways it's better. Besides, the music is free -- talk about a killer argument! And on the hi-fi side, there is the CD's inevitable successor.
Or rather successors. Super Audio has been out since December, and DVD-Audio is on the horizon, though unfortunately that horizon seems to be getting no closer. The new formats are being acclaimed even by those who always claimed CD was perfect. And by us too, truth to tell.
But in fact this may a great time to buy a CD player.
The millions of MP3 compressed files on the Net are seductive, if only because you don't have to pay for them, but they are of only incidental interest to the audiophile. The "compression" actually consists of discarding most of the sonic information. Why spend money on high resolution amplifiers and speakers when there's no extra information to resolve? What you hear is what you'll get, even through a better system.
Super Audio is seductive too, but at the moment it is merely the opening salvo of a war. Sony, Philips and the others are the soldiers in that war, but we are the civilians...and possibly the "collateral damage." Super Audio may well be tomorrow's hi-fi medium of choice, but it is not today's, because there is virtually no software. What's more, there won't be a market for software until we know for sure that the medium is here to stay. DVD-Audio is in the same boat, except that its water line is a lot higher.
So what now? Should you wait?
In fact, many people have been waiting. And waiting. And waiting. If you're listening to a player you owned when you began waiting, chances are you're missing quite a lot of what's on the many discs in your collection.
It is a fact that there is a good deal more music on the old 16 bit 44.1 kHz CD than most of us thought when it first came out. That was proved years ago by designers whose players had five-digit price tags, but now it's being proved again with players real people with jobs and mortgages can buy.
In our pages there are detailed reviews of five current generation CD players. They vary in quality, of course, but there isn't a dud in the bunch. The best of them got us excited about how good CD can sound. You don't have to be a millionaire to discover that for yourself.
If you already have a very good player, you may elect to wait. If not, there are some surprises in store for you. Life is short...and with the right music it can be so sweet.
Follow us, and we'll do what we can to help you make the right choice.
The threats to the CD are obvious. On the mid-fi side, the ubiquitous cassette lies bleeding, replaced more and more by dowloadable music from the Internet. MP3 quality is not worse than that of most cassette decks, and in many ways it's better. Besides, the music is free -- talk about a killer argument! And on the hi-fi side, there is the CD's inevitable successor.
Or rather successors. Super Audio has been out since December, and DVD-Audio is on the horizon, though unfortunately that horizon seems to be getting no closer. The new formats are being acclaimed even by those who always claimed CD was perfect. And by us too, truth to tell.
But in fact this may a great time to buy a CD player.
The millions of MP3 compressed files on the Net are seductive, if only because you don't have to pay for them, but they are of only incidental interest to the audiophile. The "compression" actually consists of discarding most of the sonic information. Why spend money on high resolution amplifiers and speakers when there's no extra information to resolve? What you hear is what you'll get, even through a better system.
Super Audio is seductive too, but at the moment it is merely the opening salvo of a war. Sony, Philips and the others are the soldiers in that war, but we are the civilians...and possibly the "collateral damage." Super Audio may well be tomorrow's hi-fi medium of choice, but it is not today's, because there is virtually no software. What's more, there won't be a market for software until we know for sure that the medium is here to stay. DVD-Audio is in the same boat, except that its water line is a lot higher.
So what now? Should you wait?
In fact, many people have been waiting. And waiting. And waiting. If you're listening to a player you owned when you began waiting, chances are you're missing quite a lot of what's on the many discs in your collection.
It is a fact that there is a good deal more music on the old 16 bit 44.1 kHz CD than most of us thought when it first came out. That was proved years ago by designers whose players had five-digit price tags, but now it's being proved again with players real people with jobs and mortgages can buy.
In our pages there are detailed reviews of five current generation CD players. They vary in quality, of course, but there isn't a dud in the bunch. The best of them got us excited about how good CD can sound. You don't have to be a millionaire to discover that for yourself.
If you already have a very good player, you may elect to wait. If not, there are some surprises in store for you. Life is short...and with the right music it can be so sweet.
Follow us, and we'll do what we can to help you make the right choice.
(One of the reviews that follow is included here complete, and the others are here in part. Click your choice below.)
PARTIAL TEXT: Putting Vinyl on CD, the Montreal Show, Digital Radio, the Moon Eclipse, the Linn Genki, the Rega Jupiter and Io, the Cambridge D500, the Oskar Kithara
FULL TEXT: MaxiVision 48 film. Testing CD Players, the Linn Ikemi, Listening in the Nearfield, State of the Art