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DVD for CD

My system is having a bit of a thin out due to the march of technology. It will still have all the usual suspects, i.e. vinyl, FM and CD along with a Music Server. My CD player is an old Marantz CD52IISE which has given me good service for the past 15 years. However, I also have a Toshiba SD330E DVD player which had good reviews for its CD abilities and I was considering retiring the Marantz in favour of the Toshiba for the time being. The Toshiba has line and digital outputs and I was considering using this with a Musical Fidelity X-DAC that a friend is selling. Is this a reasonable combination?
 
There's only one way to find out!

My experience of CD transports is that they don't make too much difference. DVD transports, I dunno. Bear in mind though a lot of the expensive players use DVD transports as CD disc readers.
 
Some of the bigger,"Better" Japanese flagship dvd players make excellent transports,my Denon DVD 3930 is one such player,fed into a decent dac it is pretty special!!!
 
One of the reasons for asking the question in the first place was the fact that I am keen to go the one box route. Eventually I want to upgrade to a good DVD/Blu Ray player and really wanted confirmation that the right ones can give good results with CD's when allied to good peripherals.
 
Is it not about ergonomics? If you have to fanny about with a TV or you can't see the tracks displayed then I wouldn't bother. Alternatively, if your DVD does HDCD, you might get to hear what Bill Gates stole from us.
 
My Denon does the lot,cdda,dvda,sacd,hdcd,not quite as good as my red book player for cd replay but for all others,including excellent 20 bit dts discs,it excells!!!
 
I have a Popcorn Hour C-200 network multimedia server with bluray drive fitted. It is ok but not great on CDs, I've recently resurrected my old Meridian 206 and this sounds much much better. But for bluray and dvds the Popcorn Hour is truly excellent.

Hope this is relevant, good luck with your project.
 
Some of the bigger,"Better" Japanese flagship dvd players make excellent transports,my Denon DVD 3930 is one such player,fed into a decent dac it is pretty special!!!

Get a Pioneer DV717 or 737 to use as a transport. Go for about £35 these days. Were £550 - £700 10years ago. Very good.
 
The corrrect thing to have for an all purpose digital transport (except blu ray) if you must have a box to feed the beer mats into is a Tag Mclaren DVD32R.

In playing DVD's or CD's it is in fact as good as my mediacentre PC

But if you can live without a stack of beer mats in your living room buy a PC!
 
I tried a DVD player to play CDs, it works but the ergonomics are poor and it's really slow to load. I'd avoid it.
 
I very much doubt the Toshiba would compete with the Marantz as a stand-alone machine but through the Musical fidelity DAC is another story. Give it a try!
 
I have similar experience to stevec67; the ergonomics of DVD and Bluray players for CD playback are the biggest problem - the CD can take quite some time to load compared to a CD player. Another issue with DVD and Bluray players can be disc player mechanical noise.

So I actually regularly use a Cambridge CXU for SACD and films and a Moon 260DT (into a Chord DAC64/II) for CDs both are mechanically silent. And yes the Moon is just that little bit better into the DAC with CDs than the CXU, but the real reason I have the Moon is for the ergonomics, the sheer luxury of putting a disc in and getting instant music...
 
I use an Arcam DV139 for CD duties and it sounds fine much better than my previous Cyrus DVD 7+ and power supply.
 


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