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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

CDs just seem so much better. Yes it's technically digital, but can you tell?

I didn't think so, until a couple of weeks ago.

I was in a record store and it had a CD player on sale for $30. One of those cheap blister-pack jobs. Just for a laugh, I bought it, and a couple of CD versions of records I own. (Genesis, New Order, R.E.M.)

I thought "digital is digital" so it shouldn't matter that it was cheap.

It wasn't great.

I sounded very flat. Even with my expensive headphones, it just didn't sound right. I'm not sure if "mechanical" is the right word, but it was noticeably different, and I'm not someone who has perfect hearing. It just sounded... boring.

So I compared the CD sound with the record versions that I rip with a $20 USB dongle and Audacity. The record rips sound much better than the CDs.

Maybe someone with perfect hearing will think otherwise. But I'm not an audiophile. I'm just a guy who likes gadgets.

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Digital is digital, but you’re ignoring multiple places where things might not be the same:

That $30 CD player… if it’s connected to headphones, how were the headphones driven? Especially if you have nice headphones, it’s very easy for a cheap device to not be able to competently drive them.

Vinyl vs CD mastering is a thing. There could be differences there. Additionally, depending on how you ripped the vinyl (especially with a “cheap dongle”) that may introduce its own color to the record.

There’s a reason why music collectors differentiate between every single source, because often there are differences (sometimes small, sometimes big) between the various sources.

Usually that means the record was mastered differently (because you literally physically can't make a record as "loud" as a CD).

It's not the CD's fault, it's the mastering engineers.

Yeah it depends on where the producer expects the CD to be played.

99% of music is made to be played on radio / in car etc., a noisy environment, where you don't want to be adjusting the volume knob all the time. So the dynamics are stripped in mastering phase.

Music that gets pressed on vinyls isn't mastered for car-play, but home stereo equipment, so it makes more sense to have larger dynamic range.

CDs have objectively lower noise floor (less hissing), and more dynamic range (difference between loudest and quietest note), but it's the mastering that usually destroys the sound. And nothing can be done about it on consumer end. Except find a less remastered version of the album in a thrift store that isn't scratched to oblivion.

There's really no reliable way to tell if a CD is going to have high dynamic range, except perhaps niche audiophile studios like https://www.stockfisch-records.de/sf12_start_e.html, but https://dr.loudness-war.info/ has fantastic list of records with their dynamic ranges, so you can check before you buy, and you can also explore and find new stuff to use to listen to your speakers ;)

If your CD player had cheap anti-skip it probably does lossy digital audio compression before output. A lot of the CD-player-as-a-package chips had older, crappy lossy audio compression and saved to a small bit of RAM on the CD player. Not much of a power envelope for compute power for audio compression logic. With memory being really expensive back in the day and prices being cutthroat there wasn't much memory for the blanti-skip buffer. So you needed fast, cheap, and really compact audio compression. Nobody really bothered improving it once MP3 players came out and memory got cheaper, so even "new" CD players use the same hardware portable CD players were using in the 90s.

And even then, it's not digital square waves coming out of your headphones. At some point that digital signal needs to be converted to analog waves. The quality of the DAC matters as well and can give a different quality of output.

If you used an analog audio output of the cheap CD player then the "digital is digital and it shouldn't matter that it was cheap" argument may not hold. The low quality of sound could be due to low quality of Digital to Analog Converter in the cheap player, not due to low quality of CD records that you have tried.

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