|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
66.241.132.98
In Reply to: CDP of the FUTURE are Fast Becoming Computers posted by Dynaudio_Rules on May 13, 2005 at 10:25:59:
PC/external DAC combo sonically outperforms even the best transports, with convenience thrown in for free (i.e. thousands of songs a mouse click away) It also shows that limitation of the Redbook standard was silver disk itself.Will it be the end of $6000 CD players? I guess not.
First of all, there is P.T. Barnum factor. Secondly, wristwatch market provides good analogy. People do not buy Patek Phillipe and Blancpain to tell time, they buy them for prestige and the pleasure of looking at them.
The same will be happen with high end CD players. They will be bought for pride of ownership reasons, not quality of musical reproduction.
(although they will not be good investment vehicle as premium watches)
Follow Ups:
I think a middle ground will be found with future transports.I know there are a lot of PC fans out there, and Ive used a PC as a transport or source more than a few times myself (w/ hoontech dsp24 soundcard doing either analogue or digital out duties).
I think people have concerns and preferences here, I for one dont like hearing a PC in the background (and yes I have water cooled, used seagate V harddrives and 'noiseless' power supplies).. But for that matter, I dont even like hearing CD players in the background (I have some here where seeks and spinning is audible from the listening chair). I dont like the idea of using a mouse to navigate (and yes again, I have used remotes with pc's and its clumsy). I dont like the idea of having the power lines around my hifi being poluted with noise, nor the potential of EMI.
I think with toys like ipods and what not proliferating like mad, and becoming cheap, that the next step in transports might be something similar. A device with enough solid state memory to store a colection of CDs/whatever, and read it out of a buffer at extremely low jitter. Theres no reason the main advantages of a PC cant be made in a unit thats much less clumsy to use, and much more friendly to the surrounding hifi environment, while taking into account all the other 'audiophile' things we love.
Interesting post. I think this is the middle of the beginning of the end of "high end" cd player sales. Eventually, the PC as transport solution will trickle up to the high end manufacturers as one box solutions with dithering algorithms. Similar to this
A computer with a good digital out sound card with say a Lucid, Grace or Benchmark DAC would be sweet!!!!!!
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: