DVD players vs CD players

As a result of dabbling in vintage stuff, I moved to a vinyl only system. However recently I bought a new blu ray player to replace my ageing Pioneer DVD player. As a bit of an experiment I have just hooked up the old player - to my surprise and delight it sounds great. Ok it's not the last word in detail or refinement but surprised me. So who else is using an old DVD player as a CD player or transport?

I am using a Blue ray player but getting it to play files sounds terrible as a CD player but when using it with files and a DAC is pretty impressive.

Things like data buffers appear in DVD & Bluray players because of their more complex and precise clocking requirements, so it makes sense for these players to sound good as transports!

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Originally Posted by Yomanze

Things like data buffers appear in DVD & Bluray players because of their more complex and precise clocking requirements, so it makes sense for these players to sound good as transports!

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If pioneer can produce these cheaply, makes you wonder why these features don't appear on dedicated CD players?

They do on a few

http://www.psaudio.com/products/audi...memory-player/

"The PerfectWave CD/DVD Memory player is a ground breaking product that removes all digital sound limitations retrieving everything from your CD collection without any jitter or sonic loss.

The PWT plays both standard and high resolution audio and sends perfect digital audio data from its solid state memory directly to your DAC and then onto your loudspeakers. It works differently than other CD players by first extracting music from the CD, then storing to an internal memory and playing from the memory instead of the disc."

…or use certain DVD / Bluray players.

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Originally Posted by Yomanze

http://www.psaudio.com/products/audi...memory-player/

"The PerfectWave CD/DVD Memory player is a ground breaking product that removes all digital sound limitations retrieving everything from your CD collection without any jitter or sonic loss.

The PWT plays both standard and high resolution audio and sends perfect digital audio data from its solid state memory directly to your DAC and then onto your loudspeakers. It works differently than other CD players by first extracting music from the CD, then storing to an internal memory and playing from the memory instead of the disc."

…or use certain DVD / Bluray players.

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There seems to be some dispute as to how CD transports take data from a disc and pass it on. I myself thought that they did it in 'real time' you know like an LP. I was told by a technical man at Emotiva Audio that this was wrong and the reader takes data off the CD in chunks and passes them on to a memory buffer before passing the data down the chain to the Dac. I was told that the buffer in a typical CD player was small and they were larger in DVD players as they have to handle higher data levels. If this is true this PS Audio Player doesn't really do things much differently to CDP's, it just has a bigger buffer. Bet the price tag is pretty big too!

Computer based transports support the SCSI MultiMedia command set. The Play or Play Audio command tells the transport to play a music track out of the drives inbuilt analogue section. The Read command on the other hand tells the transport to read from a certain physical block of data on the CD for a number of X blocks in length.

These data blocks are transferred over the transports computer interface IE: SATA or the old PATA interface. This is the command used when 'ripping' tracks from the CD. The blocks of data then have to be decoded and assembled into the PCM file or stream as required for playback.

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Originally Posted by Ned664

So who else is using an old DVD player as a CD player or transport?

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I am using an old Pioneer 717 DVD player as a transport and I think it sounds very good indeed :thumbsup:

Currently looking for a certain budget DVD player that Goldmund added a few quid's worth of stuff to and charged many many thousands for...!

To be honest i was getting fed up with having to buy CD+DVD sets or do without, seems that they assume everyone has a DVD player within their system.. Do people have DVD players in their system! i certainly do not.

Well, they didn't have DVD players built into radiograms, did they Andre? ;)

I think DVD players make excellent CD transports - currently listening to my Arcam DV29 playing a CD thru my NOS TDA1541A DAC. :thumbsup:

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Originally Posted by jandl100

Well, they didn't have DVD players built into radiograms, did they Andre? ;)

I think DVD players make excellent CD transports - currently listening to my Arcam DV29 playing a CD thru my NOS TDA1541A DAC. :thumbsup:

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I agree.

I used a Denon 2910 for a long time - also played SACD, which is useful if you have a few of them.

I might yet get another Denon DVD player for such duties..

P

It used to be suggested that dvd players made good cd players. What's changed? Jon Marks one-time editor of Hi Fi World used to use an early Panasonic A350 with some Magneplanner SMG speakers. Can't remember what amp he used.

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Originally Posted by The Barbarian

To be honest i was getting fed up with having to buy CD+DVD sets or do without, seems that they assume everyone has a DVD player within their system.. Do people have DVD players in their system! i certainly do not.

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I have the DVD player but no TV :)

As with most things the SQ you get depends on the quality of the player and ancilliaries, there are those that sound awful and those that sound frickin' awesome ;)

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Originally Posted by Mr Kipling

It used to be suggested that dvd players made good cd players. What's changed? Jon Marks one-time editor of Hi Fi World used to use an early Panasonic A350 with some Magneplanner SMG speakers. Can't remember what amp he used.

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Stephen

I think some people thought that the superior data buffer function in the DVD player helped.

P