Quote Originally Posted by Funambulistic View Post
That being said, I have heard a sonic difference between some CD players (nowhere nearly as obvious as different speakers can be, of course).
I've also heard differences between amps and between cd players. Or, more to the point, think I had heard differences... Because that's the thing. Placebo, you think you hear things you don't...

I've also noticed that my EQ tweaks finally managed to pay off, only to realize that the EQ section was turned off... Ouch...

Again, it goes back to, is there really differences or not? And if there really are differences, what are they and where do they come from? Some pieces of equipment purposely alter the signal.. Some might play louder than others (case of cdps), alter FR... So again, in the case of cd players, different doesn't necessarily mean better, same for cables, amps, etc...

After a while, I was able to purchase a Sony XA2ES CD player (retail in ’98 was $800 – I bought it on Audiogon on for $250) and it sounded much better (this was a purely subjective assessment because I thought it should: built like a tank, smooth as silk transport mechanism).
Thanks

I popped in a CD and, being intimately familiar with my kit (one of the reasons detractors of blind testing cite it being bogus – along with fear of being called out) felt something was off and the music did not sound “right”. I did everything I could to make everything equal between the two (the CD player had a set of variable outputs and I level matched as well as I could with a cheap RadioShack meter). My daughter and I had some duplicate titles and I went back and forth (I even had her switch outputs without telling which was which – a rudimentary ABAB, ABBA, etc. test) and the CD player sounded better to my ears every time. Now, I wanted the DVD player to sound better because I liked it so much, which, in effect, negated my subjectivism. Needless to say, I kept both. The DVD player had an awesome picture (that is an argument in of itself; some pundits believe DVDs are DVDs and Blue-rays are Blue-rays and, because they are digital, no player's picture is visually discernable from another).
Interesting. It would be interesting to find out why that is.

I've browsed stereophile which does measurements to see how their high end cdps would compare to cheap units, but I wasn't able to find a cheap unit... lol They did a sony playstation 1 but it got destroyed by UPS and supposedly the DACs and RCAs varied and measured sounded much worst... Meh...


For the rest, there's either differences or there's not. If there are differences, then they'll be measurable, and if they're audible, should pass a DBT test. It's possible that there are differences, and that they do sound different, but maybe it's because of an additional circuit or something... Jitter... Noise... No idea... Not impossible. But as I said earlier, different doesn't necessarily mean better. And it's also possible that there's no differences, and the test sample wasn't high enough, that because it was not DBT some outward factor influenced the result...

People have been saying the same for cables and interconnects. Yet, has monster or any other cable company ever done a DBT to demonstrate they do indeed sound better? James Randi is offering one million dollars to anyone who can differentiate cables (not broken). Problem is that audiophile listening tests aren't rigorous and error prone. Until DBTs show that audible differences are there to be heard, (and why), then going with Occam's razor, rigorous DBT tests trumps error prone tests...

But I'm all for being proven wrong...