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You Could Be In For Pleasant Surprises




I got to hear CDs during the summer of 1986. My dad's coworker had a Panasonic portable. I'm pretty sure the first disc I heard was something from Andreas Vollenweider. That piqued my interest. I began to see record clubs offering CDs. In the Fall of '86, Sony had this promotion, where, if you purchased a Sony CD player, you could send in the UPC code, and get 5 free CDs from, I believe, Columbia Music House. And if I'm not mistaken, one ad featured Genesis monkeying around behind a studio console.

I don't know about other markets, but here in San Francisco, by the end of 1986, record stores stopped stocking vinyl, and loaded up on cassettes and CDs, which then came in long boxes. I got my first CD player in April '87, when I was a high school sophomore. From the get-go, it was more convenient, and hands-down superior to my record and cassette players.

In 1987, my high school classmates first had to get a Walkman. Then they started getting CD players. The CD medium truly added to the pop music explosion of the late-80s.

Obviously, I was well aware of the Stereotypical Audiophiles and their stinky attitude and bigotry toward CD. Sadly, those negative biases steadfastly remain.

Anyway, in those 80s, popular music from the 60s was called "Oldies." Even back then, I did not like that moniker. Fast forward to 92-93, my senior year at UC Santa Cruz. My Adcom GTP-400 was able to pull in an "Oldies" station from Central California, perhaps Soledad. My housemates and I loved the variety of 60s and early-70s that station played. As much as we loved sitting in that college apartment, and listening to music, the Turtles' "Happy Together" made us feel as though we were with dates at the Boardwalk, and perhaps during a time before the earthquake had wiped out Santa Cruz.

On one warm and sunny afternoon, the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" came blasting through the radio. Right then and there, we had that crystal realization about why Brian Wilson championed this song as a pop masterpiece. It inspired us to go out, and buy CDs of "Oldies."

Understand that the 60s were before we were born. When we did get those "Oldies" CDs, the music made us feel as though the ghosts of UCSC's original students, the real hippies, were there with us.

As I've said about amps and preamps, who cares if it's got tubes, transistors, paper, rock, or scissors? When we audiophiles do these silly tubes vs. solid state debates, we are not seeing the forest for the trees.

In the Spring '93 quarter, one of my last classes was American Popular Music. The professor had his TA go up to the podium, turn on a recording device built into a keyboard, and make random noises. The TA then played back his recording. The professor then asked the class, "Is that music?"

Silence.

Finally, one male student shouted, "Fuck yeah!"

The professor nodded his approval. Right then and there, he shot down TAS' idiotic canard about "real music in real space." ...And I enjoyed those hard-panned stereo recordings of the 60s even more.

There are myriad CD players in the $700-$800 range. And, if you scour the used market, you have many more to choose from.

Of the tubed CD players I've reviewed, the Eastern Electric Minimax CD was the cheapest, the EAR Acute the most expensive. The former, which used two 6922s, was actually a lot of fun. But it has a high analog output voltage. That is incompatible with systems in the small rooms I have.

Of course, the other avenue you can take, is to rip your CDs to some kind of network storage.

I know many audiophiles, for whom CD is not a primary source. Their sub-$1000 CD players can be kind of old. Off the top of my head, I think some of the brands they have include Anthem, Arcam, CAL, Cambridge Audio, Emotiva, Marantz, Music Hall, Musical Fidelity, NAD, Parasound, Rotel, Oppo, Rega, and Sony. If we put aside our Stereotypical Audiophile bias against the CD medium, many of these CD players do not sound bad, and actually do a credible job of bringing the music to us. Plenty of audiophiles e-mail me, telling me how surprised they are, at just how good their CDs can be. It's just that they needed to overcome that SA bias, and find the right CD playback gear.

Yep, there's a lot to choose from. That can be intimidating, but it's better to have lots to choose from, than too few :-)

p.s.: if you haven't done so already, get your existing cables onto a proper cable burn-in device. It's one of the most cost-effective things in all of audio. When we use these devices, we unlock cables' true potential. And once that happens, we often discover that those cables, no matter how much use they had received, were choking off our existing gear's performance. So if you ever head into Phoenix, you could contact Audio Excellence AZ's Alan Kafton, and ask him how much it is to Cook your cables.



Edits: 05/10/15 05/10/15

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  Kimber Kable  


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