[Harry Lavo]

"Eeyore" wrote in message
...


Ivan Katz wrote:

I remember back in the 80s when CD players were brand new, I went to a
clinic given at Harvey by Sony. I dragged my Magnavox, yes Magnavox
because it had great converters, to the clinic and had the Sony people
connect it to their test equipment and give me a print out.
The unit did very well and they were a wee bit surprised so I got invited
to A--B it with their top of the line ES player, which BTW cost about 10
times what I paid for the Magnavox....

They did have a comparator and the tests were double blind.

Nothing was rigged as far as I could tell, unlike a Bose dog and pony
show I went to...don't ask.....

We sat there sipping some nice wine and enjoying the music but none of us
could hear any difference between the $300 player and the $2500 player.
Maybe it was us?
Maybe it was the wine?
Who knows!

That was until a CD with tubuler bells was played.
Yep, the Sony sounded clearer and everyone could hear the difference.
We all laughed though because WTF?
How many people play solo tubular bell CDs and even still, the difference
was so minor you had to really concentrate to hear it.
Still, there WAS a difference....

Early converters were pretty crappy.

It goes to show how good they were compared to everything else that
despite
those limitations, it required a specific album to show up some of those
limitations.

I thought that the Sony CDP-101 was pretty rubbish myself. I was convinced
I
could hear echo tails being truncated. Then I heard a CD player using
oversampling, a Denon DCD1700 and bought it. I still have it.

Early convertors did have their problems...I had a wonderful (in most ways)
Phillips 880 back in '89....wonderful except that between notes it "went
black". The tail and ambience just disappeared. And it wasn't natural
silence....it was unnatural silence. But then, we who didn't think CD was
the end-all product that it was promoted as were, as everybody knows, just
kooks and audiophools.