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In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: A CD player of today… 20 years after TL0

Post Subject: Golden agePosted by steverino on: 12/8/2013

It is one of those curious facts that Golden Ages generally occur quite early in the process of some domain of activity and then things slowly go downhill. In other words the Golden Age is followed by the Silver Age then the Bronze Age then the Slag Age but not the reverse sequence ending with the Golden Age. I am no digital specialist for sure but even I am aware that many experts consider the build quality of 90s digital components superior to anything built today. To be fair, given that most people are listening to mp3 audio on phones and portable players or to poorly implemented HT, wouldn't a vendor think there was more money in "upgrading MP3" than doing something like a Golden Age $1k DAC or music server? At this point I'm only aware of Marantz and Esoteric (and perhaps Sony) even offering a traditional escalating line of CD/SACD/DVD players and DACs. Even with them, the only improvements in years have been with convenience features and more I/O options. I think also that the poor sonics of many CDs and SACDs discourage much development because a more accurate player may make them all unlistenable. It's safer to provide a better USB cable or IPOD docking station. I agree that the dedicated laptop server with associated music files is probably the only thing that we can reasonably look forward to seeing. Bryston has a silly priced dedicated non-transport player for CD files but at least they are removing all kinds of moving parts and non essential computer components from the player.

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