I don't see it happening anytime soon. Digital means better, don't you
know.


I've been trying to stay out of this argument. My technical knowledge is
admittedly limited, and I feared I would be chewed up and spit out by the
"big
boys" around. But the digital vs. analog debate has been around for
sometime,
and I think any reasonable person with a reasonable amount of knowledge
would
conclude that while both have advantages, digital maintains more of them
than
does analog.

Well, I was being facetious mostly. My comment was actually referring to
the trend in recent design (and moreso marketing) to incorporate digital
qualities into equipment where such "enhancements" (and I use that term
loosely) are unwarranted. In this case, it would be digital volume
knobs/buttons. But in other cases, it would be signal processing equipment,
for instance. Or, more generally, the trend of sticking the words digital
on the box even when nothing has been digitized (eg. "digital amps" -
they're not digital; they're PWM which relies on duty cycle - an entirely
analog strategy).


The inherent "warmth" of analog recordings is desired by some so
called "audiophiles" as is the sense of "depth" or "studio feel" analog
provides. However, many people would rather avoid the warmth of analog and
trade off the "depth" for the "cleanliness" of digital. In order to bring
this
back around to the discussion of headunits, I'll also comment that when
both
had their EQs defeated, and all other factors remained constant, I could
not
identify either an Alpine CDA-9815 or an Eclipse CD8443 in blind testing,
and
in a seperate listening, I couldn't identify any unique sound from a Nak
CD45z.
In addition, I've had the chance to hear both Pioneer's P9 and Alpine's
F#1
deck in action and again, with EQs defeated, not only could I not identify
differences between the two decks (in terms of SQ), I was astonished at
their
high pricing.

I agree with the rest of this.