General Asylum

Posted by Joe Rosen (i) on June 08, 2001 at 15:22:58

In Reply to: Yikes, and I thought I had A.D.D. ;-) posted by Aurelio S. on June 07, 2001 at 00:59:43:

Aurelio:
When I said the technology "died" in 1991/2 I meant in CD players, not garbage toys made with the usual crummy Philips parts (Rotel, NAD, maybe even Arcam). And therefore I meant the "best" CD players you could buy, not the worst ones! I'm sure the newer Rotel sounds better. The old one is probably screwing up, meaning that the laser is heading south on you! Or it's just a typical Rat-Hell botched piece'o'junk (quality made in Taiwan, along with NAD) and the sound quality of any of them is pretty random. Maybe a new one is better, maybe not!
As for what made vinyl sound better with your M-L SL3's, the $10K worth of electronics or the vinyl, it was the vinyl...
As far as making electrostats sound listenable with CD, I guess your sensitivity to listening fatigue is another factor. I'm too young to die, but it's getting harder to rock'n'roll...
It's pretty difficult to "abuse" a turntable, although tonearms can get abused (installing cartridges without taking the arm off the turntable, assuming that it doesn't use a detachable headshell or have non-precision uni-pivot bearings like a Hadcock/Mayware or Naim arm) and of course stylii get bent out of shape all the time...
As for shipping, well, yeah, it COULD get damaged. So could a CD player...
As for the $411 for the "few accessories" that you'll need for the turntable, take away the silly record-cleaning machine and its fluid and you're well under $200. And those accessories are not consumables, you can sell them on if you ever decide that you don't want them, and if that happens, what would you end up losing? $100? $50? Heck, you might even end up MAKING some money!
If you've been in High-End Audio for 18 years and have never seen a CD player laser die, you are either extremely lucky or smart enough not to have kept any of the bio-degradable machinery long enough to see the inevitable happen...As for only happening to what I cheerfully refer to as "Asian Crap", what CD flayer isn't? There is some dutch crap, but other than that, EVERY CD FLAYER ever made has Asian parts in it, and most High-End machines just use the same cheap junk that Sony & Philips do, because that's the only source for it!
You think Wadia, Meridian or Levinson make their own lasers? Boy, you'd better think again! I've seen Denon CD players that break down annually, others that ram the laser into the discs when it gets weak because it can't focus properly anymore and make lovely radial scratches in them in the process, a couple of Technics players where when the laser wore out the cost of replacement far exceeded the value of the machine (and after only about 3 or 4 years of use!)...
I have a beautiful Dual CD120 player that a buddy of mine gave me, mint condition, a front-loader with a vertical clear disc door and the coolest loading mechanism you've ever seen. It still works, sort of...but it makes these magic-marker squeaks, mutes, chirps and generally sounds pretty bitey when it decides to play a disc, which it can never start at the beginning of anymore...ditto a little Radio Shack machine I've got that also works, but only if the discs aren't more than about 45 minutes in length! Otherwise it just plays selected excerpts, by happily skipping across the disc in "record" time...breathe on it and you can further accelerate the maniacal process. I also used to have a NAD 502, which burned out its display (turned out to be a cheap incandescent bulb soldered to a circuit-board, I was actually able to fix this nonsense myself) and then also got the skippies, again, "dead laser". What do you think makes these players skip? Invisible scratches? Never seen a player skip? You've got to knock a record player with an elbow or set it up dead-wrong to get it to do anything remotely as ill-mannered...
"I'm sorry, if I've just spent a couple of grand on an analog rig (Where are you getting these ridiculous numbers from? You could probably get something better than your CD player used for $150 with a brand new, half-decent phono cartridge!) I'm not blowing or prodding anything, I'm buying the accessories I need to make sure that it's done correctly".
And what would those be? A tonearm bearing friction guage? Sorry, there is no such thing! But have you spent the $5000 to make sure that your laser is optimally focussed in your CD player, taken an engineering course to learn how to do it, spent the $25-75 for the service manual to get the model specific instructions to do same, as well as buy the obligatory $100 Test Disc to optimize the "eye" pattern on your oscilloscope? How about adjusting the least significant bits on your DAC(s), to optimize low-level linearity? Assuming that your machine uses a good enough DAC that the manufacturer bothered to allow you to make these adjustments without having to modify the circuit board to install potentiometers and relevant circuitry to the appropriate DAC pins?
You think these pieces of junk leave the factories optimized? No! Of course not! You just plug the junkbox into the wall, hook up some RCA's and away you go! Hey, perfect sound forever man, as long as you have no idea what perfect sound is, you're a happy guy!
There are internal adjustments in CD players for tweaking the low-level linearity of the DAC's (I have a quad-DAC Yamaha, and it has adjustments for four of the LSB's on each DAC! That's SIXTEEN DAC adjustments!), for adjusting the focus of the laser (usually a couple), for adjusting the laser intensity...have I forgotten any here? The only difference is that you can set up a turntable, but only a laboratory can set up your CD player. But hey, if it works, you're happy, right? For guys with that attitude, they used to make turntables with fixed counter-weights and P-mount cartridges that plugged into tonearms with absolutely no adjustments. And full automatic operation. You still had to select the speed (bummer!), but I think even Bang & Olufsen made models where you didn't have to even do that( but they had those pesky tracking force adjustments, instead).
Maybe I am out of touch about what a dealer charges you to use his fluid on his machine (and his labour to do this!). But you make it sound like I was suggesting that they'd charge you 75 cents a COLLECTION, I did mean per record, doncha know...Then you ask what you'd do if you spilled something on only one record, like if not having this $210 Whirly-Pop record cleaning machine in your own house and having to take that one miserable record to a dealer with a machine to clean it would be the most horrible inconvenience in the world...Aurelio...Baby!
What would you do if you spilt something on a CD??? I know I throw 'em away, and I like to do that with ones I don't spill things on, either. Maybe you could clean your CD's with the Whirly-Pop machine too, would that convince you that it could be a worthwhile investment???
As another poster mentioned, $12.99 for CD's is OK, but you'd want to buy vinyl for a buck a (whirly) pop, so now you're going to tell us that you can't see how you'd justify the $210 for the record cleaning machine? Hey, save $12 a disc (and what about tax!), and Mr. Record Cleaning machine pays for himself in less than two dozen music purchases, even allowing for the cost of cleaning fluid (and you can make your own, I do and I don't pay no buck an ounce!) at retail.
But you're the lad who wants to drop a couple of G's on a record playing rig, so if you think that's what its about, why buy filthy old yard sale records when you could spend $5 a (whirly) pop and get clean ones that were actually treated with some respect by previous owners instead? I've bought literally THOUSANDS of nice, used records, and I doubt that even 1% of them really need cleaning. They all play fine, sound pretty quiet and all that!
Oh, another thing. Oversampling is about getting better sound (a desperate and wasted endevour as far as CD is concerned). It has nothing at all to do with error correction, and no doubt it contributes to errors of its own if not properly implemented. What you're thinking about is something called "interpolation", which is error correction. If the idea of scratches and (whirly) pops bugs the heck out of you, you could always look around for one of those 1970's "click & pop" suppressor accessories that were sold by companies like RG Dynamics and SAE. Of course, they screw up the sound, but that's nothing compared to what CD does to the sound, so you can implement digital-type solutions in the analog domain. I personally can hear the interpolation making increasingly bad guesses as my discs get older (try listening to a player go through a heavy thumb-print on a disc while wearing headphones and listening to a sustained note held by a female vocalist. Pretty funny.), so I'll take the clicks & pops instead, please. The cure here is definitely worse than the disease...
"So you are saying that an analog rig, with all its constantly moving mechanical parts, some rubbing together-can last the rest of my life, while a CDP, with NO moving, rubbing parts other than selector knobs/switches, will wear out sooner?"
You REALLY don't know how CD players work, do you?
A CD player has a platter, a platter motor precisely controlled by a DC servo fed from information it gets from a very complex microprocessor that monitors data input flow, the laser moves up/down and left/right to follow the very rapidly spinning disc (approximately 5-10 times faster than an LP spins) and try to follow a "groove" of spiral lands & pits embedded on the discs' surface that each occupy only 1/100th the space a groove does on an LP, with no mechanical guidance to lock it in place (the laser signal is read by a photo-detector, which is in itself segmented into fractions so that it can decipher how the laser is drifting off alignment and send an electrical signal back to the laser servo electronics to tell them how to adjust this!). The CD is CONSTANTLY changing speed, since the LINEAR velocity is what counts with this crapnology, not the far-simpler rotational velocity of the record player. Variations in exact speed are supposedly not important, as long as the microprocessor's buffer is neither under (fart, burp, mute!) or over (same) fed with data. Oh, and laser's wear out, the mechanical parts that guide it are prone to wear and gumming up, and deterioration in the electronic parts in the servo (like cheap electrolytic capacitors, of which you'll find dozens if not hundreds in the whole machine) add to the fun, along with the CD spindle motor developing play and wearing out and responding less well to the servo signals with age. And then there is the loading mechanisms, which screw up more often than anything else. One of my Denon's occasionally needs a helping hand to shut all the way (and won't play unless tapped with a friendly middle finger), and one of my Yamaha's won't open its drawer at all unless you let the player "warm up" for 10 to 15 minutes before hitting the "drawer open" button anywhere from two to ten times...I've had that machine open, no belts are slipping and nothing is gummed up. The loading motor is getting tired, ditto the one in the Denon...
CD players are over-complicated electronic "toys", and to attempt to repair old ones is like taking Old Yeller to the Vet for a heart transplant. Maybe you can keep him going another six months or a year, but he's on his way out, and nothing is going to stop the process.
What "rubs" in a turntable? The belt doesn't "wear out", it usually dries up! When that happens, it loses its resiliency and stretches and then starts slipping. $20 and life is wonderful again. Turntables have a motor, the better ones use AC jobs that have maybe a resistor & one capacitor attached to them. After 10 or 20 years, the motor may start to get noisy and act like it's going to die soon. So you spend $75-125? and get a new one. See you again in 20 years! If the turntable is a cheaper job with a direct-dive motor or a DC servo, then things are a little more complicated. But DC servo motors usually cost less than $50 and were once plentiful, and the electronics that control them are quite reliable and relatively simple to troubleshoot for any decent tech. No custom microprocessors to control them, so no worry about getting the parts to do that!
As for your Dual turntable Vs. ReVox CDP comparison, maybe the problem is Dual, not the technology. Dual used DC servo motors in their later turntables, and my Dual CDP is dead as well! The ReVox sounds like crap not because it's an early example of the technology, it sounds like crap because it's a ReVox. All ReVox solid-scrape stuff sounds like crap! Ever listen to an A77, B77 or A700? I can assure you, I've had many an open-reel machine, and transistor ReVox is firmly at the bottom of that barrel.
If a digital rig lasted 15 years, and nothing "broke", it would still not be the more economical option to the turntable. It is a total disaster waiting to happen, not a simple old soldier in need of the odd replacement part. Once the CDP gets old enough, the whole rig is GARBAGE. You can't just easily swap the laser out of it, or remove the motor/spindle/servo assembly and throw it into some other player. This is all brand and model specific stuff, you can't just take a screwdriver to it, and good luck getting any support with it! Compare that to getting support for a Rega, Linn, Thorens, J.A. Michell or VPI. As far as comparing performance in the 2K range, I must totally disagree with where you are going with the analogy. The more you spend on digital, the LESS it improves relative to the cheaper models. The opposite is true with a turntable! Sure, there gets a point with them where more is merely just to get increased decadence, but by that time you'd be well north of $15K, and the difference between a $15K digital rig and a $2K one is far smaller than it is with turntables!
So c'mon! Put up yer dukes!
Cheers,
-Joe R.