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te_chris

Yes. But shhhhh about cds, don’t want people to realise…

Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.

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I did just realize after posting maybe touting how affordable CDs have become is maybe not the best idea.

:'D

I can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now.

Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him.

It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.

Oh! I know this one! You're thinking of Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage's LPs from 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3urXygZXb74'

Nice one, thanks!

Humans prove to have some value in the LLM age after all! /s

Love it. Not often you get music threads like this on HN!

The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell

Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?

> all about the DAC, no?

Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.

it's surprising difficult to rip from audio CDs in a error free manner

most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches

Just use a tool that supports the AccurateRip database or similar, and check your checksums, right?

Like, ripping seems easy to me, you rip with something that supports a checksum database, and if it comes out with a correct checksum then it's right.

If you don't have a good drive and a clean disc you may get skipping/jitter and thus possibly never get a AR or CueTools DB match. (CTDB has parity records that can be used to repair some small errors.) This is the point of the elaborate re-read stuff Exact Audio Copy or cdparanoia does. Though even with a good drive you ought to be using a tool that checks for C2 errors, and that won't necessarily catch everything; error correction and detection is always probabilistic.

Also not everything is in AR/CTDB. Maybe 3% of the 1000+ CDs I've ripped had no records yet, though I do tend towards the obscure. I rip these again with EAC, which is set up to automatically do CTDB submission. (Usually I'm using the redumper tool which has some specialized features.)

Without external verification it's best to dump it twice and ensure they're bit equal, preferably with a different drive to minimize error correlation.

This page has drive accuracy test results and recommendations:

https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/

I archive CDs continuously with a workhorse of an external unit from 2010 and it converts a full album audio disc to 320kbps VBR MP3 in like ten minutes.

Only issues come from damaged retail discs and dead burned ones.

Huh. I've never had a problem with that, personally. Maybe I just got lucky with my tools.

How common were HiFi CD players without DACs? My recollection is that S/PDIF never really caught on that much so output to the amplifier was almost always analog.

Mid range/high end CD players almost always have both analog and digital outputs and have since some time in the 90s at least, so I’d say quite common.

I've had a bad experience with this just a couple years ago. I have an old DVD/CD player which at some point I realized I had no way of connecting to my new TV. The old one was a decent looking premium unit, that I got from my parents (who paid good money for it),

The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left to differentiate, and everyone started selling absolutely nasty plasticky junk.

The new Sony unit I got was a loud rattly garbage, that even though it did the things it needed to do, made such an awful noise that I had to take it back. The other one I got (don't remember the brand) was no better.

I took that one back too, and I shelved the issue, but it was kind of remarkably terrible experience for me.

Why not look online and get a "hifi grade" older used one?

Is it a budget issue or sound quality issue?

Generally DVD players make lousy CD players. Most of the annoyance is in the UI which is optimized for watching movies, not playing CDs. But there are also sometimes problems like a small buffering pause between songs, etc. which you don’t get with quality CD players.

I say this as my primary CD player is actually a Panasonic DVD player from the year 2000. This is the exception that proves the rule. At the turn of the century many quality DVD players were sold and marketed as primarily CD players with the added capability of being able to sell DVDs.

Yeah, but most of the the old (2000s in particular) mid-range hifi units all had decent-enough DAC's to do 44.1/16bit. And they're cheap now.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/317751858636 e.g. £65 doesn't even remotely get you close to listenable in vinyl.

>(Sony hifi grade, not ES)

I don't understand this, are you saying higher than ES or lower than ES?

I thought ES was their top "Elevated" Standard?

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