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Topic: Declining sound quality of CD players from 90s to present (Read 34917 times) previous topic - next topic
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Re: Declining sound quality of CD players from 90s to present

Reply #50 –
I know this is coming late, but the quality of CD players has been decreasing, well domestic players, audiophile players have been getting better and better.
The reason is very simple, in the early 21st century it became cheaper to make DVD mechanisms over CD mechanisms, as a result most domestic CD players are actually DVD players with the video replay function disabled. Unfortunately DVD players, although capable of playing CDs, are not particularly good at it. This was slightly remedied with the addition of a CD laser which helped with the bit loss problem (an issue for ROM drives as most Software still came on CD), but did not solve the audio issue. I suspect this is due to timing issues (Jitter), DVDs are read at a different speed to CDs and this introduces a huge amount of Jitter. You can't measure Jitter through bit by bit comparisons, because the data stream is identical (solving the ROM issue, but not the audio issue), as the problem is entirely in the timing domain.
Interestingly you don't see this issue if you play CDs on a computer because the CD is read into memory and then played from memory, eliminating the timing issues.
Audiophile CD players solved this problem in 2 ways, some manufacturers chose to go with DVD drives, but buffer the data and re-clock it, others built their own CD drives.

http://www.hifichoice.co.uk/news/article/cyrus-cd-xt-signature--pound;1750/20464

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitter

Re: Declining sound quality of CD players from 90s to present

Reply #51 –
Quote from: ScepticKev on
audiophiles have been getting dumber and dumber.
The reason is very simple
Yes.
I suspect they've become more emboldened here too, with Greynol et al being more scarce.
Loudspeaker manufacturer

Re: Declining sound quality of CD players from 90s to present

Reply #52 –
Quote from: ScepticKev on

What an absolute steaming heap of complete and utter bullshit.

Doesn't it hurt to be this apocalyptically wrong about literally everything?

Re: Declining sound quality of CD players from 90s to present

Reply #54 –
The things I've seen more of is some players fading in the first hundred or so milliseconds of given track with no way to turn it off.

Or shutting off the audio when null samples (digital silence) are playing for more than some predetermined amount of time by the manufacturer to try to hide a device's rather poorly designed and often noisy output.  No option to turn if off or disable it.

Or players that can play MP3 discs but do not let you listen to redbook audio tracks should you decide you want to listen to a PC game's soundtrack (lacking a simple setting or switch).

What I've basically seen more of is pointless features that cannot disabled.  No online reviewer on any site like Amazon ever points out this when looking at a product to buy.  But there's plenty of audiophile nonsense to go around.  It's more like this product sounds great or this product sounds really bad.  Or this product failed after a couple months and is total garbage when how they're taking care of it should be called into question.

Re: Declining sound quality of CD players from 90s to present

Reply #55 –
The guy registered to post that. Troll if ever I saw one.

Re: Declining sound quality of CD players from 90s to present

Reply #56 –
Quote from: ScepticKev on
I suspect this is due to timing issues (Jitter), DVDs are read at a different speed to CDs and this introduces a huge amount of Jitter.
Suspecting arbitrary things with no actual understanding of how stuff works seems to be more and more en vogue these days.