New CD Player

For the past 3-4 weeks, about half the CD-Rs I have made on my computer will not read on the big stereo.  The player spins them up and displays "no disc."  (The other half work fine -- and ones that don't work ALWAYS don't work.)

Oddly, those same discs play fine in my car or in a portable player or in the DVD player under the TV.  

This tended toward a bad CD player rather than the burner...  But the CD player never failed on a commercial CD or an older burn of mine.  I was unsure exactly where the fault lay.

This morning I tried to play a couple of last night's burns, and got the "no disc."  This is ridiculous, I thought, and took the player out to the garage to blow it out with compressed air.  Could be dirty alignment lasers, right?

After blowing it out however it wouldn't recognize ANY disc.  Whoops!

Checked online with my favorite used hi-fi store in town, and they had a player with the features I wanted at a price I was willing to pay:

• Onkyo C-S5VL
  
• CDs, MP3 discs, CD-Rs, SACDs
  
• RCA, co-ax, digital and optical outputs
  
• size fits in my rack
  
• since it's Onkyo my universal remote is already set up to control it
  
• and it sounds RILLY good!
  
• so far it has played 100% of my "problem discs"
  

My old player wasn't that old. I bought it new August 2018.

New player has an odd design feature. There's push button on the right labeled "digital output" and a bright blue LED that comes on when it's pushed.

As I mentioned the player has both analog (RCA) and digital outputs (optical and coax). In my old player both were active at the same time, allowing me to switch back and forth to compare them. In the new player, it's one or the other. And if you start a CD in analog mode, you can't engage the digital switch while playing. You have to stop the CD, engage the switch, then restart the CD.

I decided to stick with the coax digital output -- it's what sounded best with the old player -- but this doesn't make it easy to compare.

Soundwise, it's hard to compare the new Onkyo with the old Onkyo since I can't A-B them. However, on material I am very familiar with, it appears the extreme high end -- bells and cymbals -- are noticeably more distinct and metallic. Midrange elements -- guitars, violins -- are more separated, clear, individually identifiable. The low end is about the same as before, as far as I can tell.

I need to keep exploring.

Okay, this is exceedingly strange.

I have a recording with some very low tones on it -- 27.5Hz -- which I've played many times with the old player.  It always rocked the house.

On auditioning it with the new player, however, I experienced a new phenomenon never before witnessed: the photos and art prints I have hanging on the walls, particularly the ones in metal frames, began vibrating against the wall.  The tones coming from the speakers were nice and pure, but all around the room things were buzzing against the walls.

What do you suppose?  The old player wasn't flat to 20Hz?  The old player didn't reproduce the 27.5 tone properly?  The old player was doubling the tone (it didn't SOUND like 53Hz)?

Anyway, I've wedged some felt furniture pads (used to prevent scratching the hardwood floor) behind the artwork and that appears to have solved the problem.

Trés weird though.

Ah.  I think I figured it out.

I have a test CD with a sweep tone that starts at 20,000 Hz and sweeps down to 5 Hz.  I never used to get anything below 20 Hz before.  Now I get a good solid response down to 20 Hz, then a dead zone between 20 and about 10 Hz, and then I can FEEL, rather than hear, output down to the 5 Hz area.  The sound of the woofers moving isn't really sound, but you can pick up some vibrations in the cabinet and you can feel the wave in your chest.

New player must be flat to 0 Hz rather than rolled off below 20 Hz.

Whoa. Top notch drum recordings are FEARSOME on the new player.

Okay, I just heard something I've never heard before, in a recording I've owned since 1972 and played hundreds of times.

The Crusaders' first album, "1" (after dropping "Jazz" from their name and becoming more fusion) opens with a track called "That's How I Feel."  I always like to play it when evaluating stereos, because the opening bass line slides down to a very low note, and then the kick drum kicks in.  It makes a very effective bottom end tester.

Test passed.

But then something else happened.  Shortly a fuzz guitar line starts up, which has always been just a fuzz guitar before.

This time I heard a high-hat cymbal playing in unison with it.

Never heard that before.  Wow.

Shit!

Now that means I have to play every CD in my collection looking for hidden gems!

New player as mentioned will play SACD discs, super audio compact discs. Higher sample rate than normal redbook 44.1KHz.

I'm not sure I have any. I'm not sure I could tell the difference aurally if I did.

Decided to look for a cheap SACD.

Most of the ones out there -- and they're kinda rare -- are '50s jazz or '70s pop, hardly the stuff of "super" audio. According to my local CD store, there's only one plant in the world that still makes them, and they're not making very many. The ones that have been made are sorta orphans, dead technology like VHS tapes and laser discs. In the store they had a few old jazz & classical titles, all priced at between $30 and $40 each. I can't see paying that for a 1950s analog recording.

I *did* see that Flim and The BBs "Tricycle" was released on SACD two decades ago, but the cheapest I could find one was $108.

I also discovered that Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" was released, and I found a place selling a used copy for $35. That seemed like a worthwhile purchase to me. It's a damn good recording, and I'm very familiar with it so I should be able to pick out any improvements.

Ve shall zee.

One of the 3 copies of "Tricycle" for sale on E-Bay had a "make an offer" option, so I offered about $60 -- $100 less than he was asking.

The seller turned me down flatly -- and said "no further offers would be entertained."

Well!!! 

I don't know whether to be relieved or insulted.

God DAMN.

With the new ultra-clarity in the high end on the new CD player, I've been noticing some imaging weirdnesses -- in some material. Not apparent in all, but occasionally I'd get some unison horn lines, or vocal choruses, where the instruments/voices didn't seem to quite mesh. Careful listening told me it was more severe in the left channel.

At first I thought maybe the capacitors on my tweeters were going bad, maybe. I disconnected everything but the tweeters (which is easy to do in my system, because the wiring is external) and, no, the tweeters sounded normal.

But wait.

They weren't in phase with each other. On center-channel material, like a cymbal, the image wasn't forming between the speakers like it should, but was diffuse. I reversed the wiring on the left tweeter, and damned it that didn't fix it! The tweeter was miswired from the factory, and I never noticed before.

Hooked everything up again, making sure everything's in phase. Wow. The image is rock solid now.

Hodgjy wrote:

Another neat thing I noticed, which took several times going back and forth between the sources, is that the Onkyo sounds more analog than the Teac.  It's just a little more smooth and musical.  I'm sure this has a lot to do with the digital filters that Onkyo utilizes.  I don't claim to know anything about them, or how they work, but I can say that they do alter the sound slightly.  I settled on Filter 4, which is supposed to be some sort of apodizing filter, because it sounds very analog.  It's the most vinyl-like I've ever heard a CD.  Now, I'm not claiming that CDs are ever going to sound like vinyl; I'm just saying that this is the best I've heard a CD at approaching the smoothness of vinyl.  The gap between vinyl and CDs is till large, but this made it just a tad smaller.  Overall, I like it very much.

Source

I'm just totally baffled by people who want their CDs to sound more like vinyl.  These filters work ONLY when using the analog outputs on the unit, which I can't imagine doing if the player has digital outputs and my receiver has digital inputs.  Why filter the output?  Why introduce distortion?

Slowly making my way through a bunch of CDs, still evaluating the new player and my hopefully-100% speakers.

Playing some Arthur Lyman this morning. These were recorded live without overdubs in the Kaiser aluminum dome on the grounds of the Hawaiian Village hotel in Waikiki. The engineer hung up three microphones -- left, right, and center fill -- and just let the group play. As a result they're as close to binaural as most recordings can get, with natural size and balance of the instruments. If you're not familiar with the group, they use a lot of exotic percussion, and in the Kaiser dome, with its 3-second natural reverb, the effect is startling. My speakers make a modern digital production blow your socks off, but a good 1959 recording sounds almost as amazing.

NoCoPilot wrote:

New player has an odd design feature.  There's  push button on the right labeled "digital output" and a bright blue LED that comes on when it's pushed.

I have a CD player (changer) with the same switch selection of digital or analog output. I bought it in 1989. And yes, it still works perfectly. I've been using it the past few days and even CDs that have been left in the cartridges for twenty or thirty years are working fine. Color me surprised.

I've been combing through my CDs, testing material on the new player, looking for stuff that shows off its capabilities.  Mostly bass & drums, percussive stuff that kicks like a mule and I've found several that have raised my hackles while giving me loose bowels.

This morning I remembered a pipe organ recording I bought a few years ago, recorded on the 18-meter high, 8,000-pipe, 147-rank, 101-stop, fully-restored Flentrop in the Church of St. Eustache in Paris.  It was recommended to me because the low pipes on this instrument are tuned to 16 Hz.  

Previously this recording struck me as good, but not overwhelming.

Now OMG different story.