"Daniel Fox" wrote in message
ups.com
Home stereo question follows:
I've got a Marantz cd-63 Mk II from circa 1995 which I
like a lot. It has always been pretty highly regarded as
a quality cd player without breaking the break, but now
mine is finally dying. I'm wondering whether to try and
get it fixed or just go for a sub $100 DVD player
instead. I've heard thru the grapevine that inexpensive
modern DVD players sound better than alot of the highter
dollar CD players of yesteryear. Is this true?
AFAIK the Marantz CD-63 was a fine player. I did some technical tests on a
CD67 some years back and obtained these results:
http://www.pcavtech.com/play-rec/cd67se/index.htm
I did some tests on a good mid-fi DVD player of the day and obtained the
following, which I would performed comparably:
http://www.pcavtech.com/play-rec/dv525/index.htm
The most obvious downside that I noticed at that time was the fact that the
DV525 did not track CDRs quite as well (although it did track almost all of
the ones I tested it with), and that it took longer to get into play mode
after loading a disc. This loading time disadvantage seems to persist to
this day. It is understandable given that the drive has a lot of
alternatives to test.
I did some casual technical tests on a sub-$100 and then a sub-$50 DVD
player a couple of years back and found similar results. The 2 players I
tested unfortunately turned out to have relatively short lives. I took one
of them apart and found that its audio section was based on some Crystal
Semiconductor (a highly-regarded manufacturer of converter chips) 24/192 DAC
chips, and that the player easily outperformed the specs on the chips.
If this all seems a little risky, you might want to pick up one of the low
cost Universal players that play SACD, DVD-A, CD's, etc. They seem to be in
your price range.
Even sub-$40 portable CD players have improved their performance. It used to
be that their shock-resistance circuits severely degraded their audio
perforamance. There is still some degradation, but they aren't nearly as bad
as they were.