At what price point are cd players overpriced and not worth it - Page 2

Most people burn their audio CDs on whatever they have, and it works out just fine.

If you burn CDRs on a stand alone audio CD recorder, you are forced to burn at 1X which may cause difficulties with common CDR's that are designed for burning at high speeds.

I doubt you'd hear make much of a difference between the old and new CD decks, if any. Anytime a previously mass market item like a standalone CD player becomes more niche, the better the old stuff is compared to the new at a given price point, and often the next-gen cheap stuff will be just as good, if not better, than both. Standalone CD players are getting to be specialty items, so the lower volume means they cost more per item than a better deck from 15 years ago. Meanwhile, the $100 DVD player has the same or better capabilities as the old CD player because the higher volume keeps the price down. This is also why a mass market $300 multichannel AVR is often a better choice for stereo listening than a $300 dedicated stereo receiver, and why many cheap 20 year old turntables that were cranked out in volume back in the day will outperform a more expensive new entry level TT.

For your FLAC question, FLAC is a good format, and more and more receivers and disc players are including USB ports and FLAC compatibility. The big drawback is that FLAC doesn't play well with itunes or apple hardware. ALAC is the apple lossless codec, which works on all apple devices and any device with airplay, and is getting more and more market penetration because of it. FLAC is still ahead for now, though. As far as sound quality, FLAC, ALAC and CD (or an uncompressed WAV copied from the CD for that matter) should all sound exactly the same. You can convert between any lossless format back and forth all day long and never lose fidelity, hence the term lossless.

For your CDR quesion, if a CDR is burned without errors, it will be identical. Really cheap and poorly manufactured CDRs may give you problems with errors that may make the CD unplayable or skippy, but as long as the crappy CDR plays, the music is exactly the same.

Yes.

Try ripping the scratched up audio CD on a PC using EAC.

This often works when nothing else does. Burn the ripped tracks to a new CD-R. It will probably read perfectly.

Buying power amps used is probably not the bad crap shoot that buying used speakers is. Power amps tend more towards catastrophic failure! So, if they work they probably work.

The best deals in power amps are usually pro audio amps by people like Crown, QSC, Behringer, etc.

I don't recall all of the details any more. Besides if I didn't know any dirt about any particular high end player, doesn't mean that there isn't any dirt to be known.

I've done bench tests on dozens of audio players and the performance of sub $100 and even sub $50 players is brilliant. A $50 player of today will match or beat a $500+ player from a decade ago or more on the test bench.

These people are clueless.

I use all 3 brands - Crown, QSC, Behringer.

I had some fun a few years back when I had both a Behringer A500 and a Pass Threshold 4E kicking around the house.

Vastly different on the bench, but within their non-clipped performance, its all the same.

Its not 'CD' vs 'mp3', its 'physical' vs 'digital' distribution. CDs are dead as a distribution medium, the only thing lacking at the moment is a major music store offering downloads in a lossless format.

You really should not hang out too much on so called "audiophile" sites. Generally clueless.

How can flac be worse than CD when it is lossless, and you can without problems burn a CD from flac files? I use foobar for ripping and burning - if needed.

I only use the bluray player build into my server to rip cd's to file in flac. About 2000 so far. And transfer of some Lp's..
I used to own denon 1420, micromega stage 2, phillips universal player 933 or whatever that was, a pioneer 59Avi, have built a few using cd rom drive and a China sourced controller that worked perfectly with SPDIF and analogue out from the drive and cost about 75$ in parts - and almost double that in a custom made frontpanel and the 1 ru enclosure. Worked like a charm for years and never was able to hear a difference between that cheapo thingy and the Micromega or the Pioneer.

I do not play Cd's anymore directly.

Economic death is not instantaneous.

Digital sales surpassed CD sales in 2011 and the trend has continued

Combined with sales of singles passing sales of albums and you run into a bit of a problem for CDs. They will reach a point where the production volumes just aren't high enough to spread out the cost of manufacturing. .

mp3 isn't the only lossy format albums are purchased in and as I said, something that is missing right now is the lossless music store, although Apple has made hints at offering lossless versions of stuff via itunes. There is no technical hurdle here, its just a matter of market demand and the market for lossless audio is tiny compared to the entire audio market.

Depends on your definition of dead. VHS is dead as a major format that doesn't mean you can't still buy them. Vinyl is dead as a format but you can still get some albums in vinyl. Interestingly vinyl sales have increased recently, thought the top selling vinyl album still had about 18,000 units sold, aka, tiny compared to the market.

CDs will just be relegated to a niche market as have VHS and vinyl. It doesn't help that record store sales declined 76% from 2000 to 2010.

As for Fyes still existing, they may manage to live, for now, but Tower Records, Sam Goody's, Virgin, etc have all gone out of business in the last ten years. The fittest will survive and become specialty shops.

I'm 29, I haven't bought a CD in almost a decade, and those were EPs sold at the door by local musicians. I bet if you split the purchasing habits by generation you'll find that my generation and younger don't even consider purchasing CDs in high enough quantities to matter.

CD players are specialty items because Blu Ray players play CDs and just about anything else. Why get a specialized tool when the generalized tool works at least as well?

No, but it will sound the same as using a regular CD player.

CDs are not a niche format (yet), but hardware components that play *only* CDs are becoming a niche item. CD players are everywhere, most just happen to pay DVDs and/or blu rays as well.

No, BD players and CD players very strongly tend to sound identically the same while playing CDs. There has been some scare talk about interference from the video circuits, but I've done a ton of bench tests of DVD and BD players as CD players and they are just fine. DVD and BD players used to be slow on the draw, but that has largely been corrected. That leaves the fact that many low end DVD and BD players are hard to use without an attached video display. Of course you can pick up a little LCD TV for like $100 and overcome that!

As far as interference from video circuits goes some players have a pure audio feature to cut off video circuits. Not sure of its utility.

For the most part you can navigate a cd just fine without a display. You still see the song number. It gets hard though when trying to navigate ripped content on an attached hard drive or through the network. Then a screen is a must.