I've got Sugden A21SE, Spendor S8e combo, now attached to a DVD player and it seems to work well as a matter of fact exceeds my expectations!. Surprisingly rich sounds down to the small details even. And the oldish Phillips DVD player has 12 bit DAC while most ones I can find now are 24 bit.

I am trying to figure if there is a really a difference between those expensive CD players and a cheap one. I tried a Sugden CD player which was really expensive and could not hear any difference in the shop. DACs are really common electrical components made in great volumes and the voltages in a CD player are really low so I don't see how an expensive CD player can be more effective than a cheap DVD player.

Has anyone really noticed the difference with those dedicated CD players vs. the normal DVD players?. When purchasing my system, I could hear the difference of different amps/speakers but not the CD player. I was looking at Marantz as all the shops in KL carry it but I can't figure if it is different.

What do you think?

The only way you can tell the diference between 2 CDP or DVD players is to bring them home and hook it up to your system.

I once made the same mistake of auditioning various high end CDPs at various places only to conclude they all sound very much the same.

But once I managed to get them for home auditions, they do sound very diferent fom one another!

Having said that, digital sources tend to have less influence on the overall sould of a system, in the whole context if you take in to account the factor that amp to speaker to room interaction is most important.

Meaning, if you change speakers, you'll likely to hear the most diference, next followed by changing amps and lastly digital sources. In fact sometimes, changing interconnect or speaker cable will give you more diference then changing CDP.

But having said that, unless you have a very high end universal player, chances are a good mid price CD player will out perform your DVD player in terms of low level resulotion retrieval, subtle musical nouces and refinement.

The only area your DVD will have an edge over the CDP is that the DVD transport has better jitter spec., hence will require less correction at the DAC stage. But most CDPs to day uses multi disk rom drives anyway.

Happy upgrades!
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