DVD players vs CD players

[Ned664]

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?

[John]

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.

[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!

[Ned664]

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!

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

[John]

They do on a few

[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.

[Dauntless]

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.

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!

[NRG]

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.

[Ninanina]

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

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

[Yomanze]

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...!