New CD player suggestions?

[amfmsw]

A question for Xtalker...with terrabite hard drives for $200, why would anyone play an mp3 on the air? They're for toys, not broadcasters.

It is the equivalent of a cassette without the benfit of Dolby. They're for kids to listen to Marylin Manson or hippity-hop noise, not for men with music. An mp3 file is 10% of a .wav, meaning, if you're programming real music with strings, horns, cymbals, vocals, or even a rock 70's symthesyser, like EL&P, it's grainy and gritty. It's not called a "lossy"file for nothing. You lose 90% of the information!

90%! Missing in action, deleted. It may be fine for AM or commercials, but NOT FM programming. Or godforbid, HDFM.

Run that grime through an Omnia or Optimod, and it's just annoying.

In fact, save your money on processing, and just use a CBS Volumax, or a Gates Sta-Level.

 

[RadioMan203]

A question for Xtalker...with terrabite hard drives for $200, why would anyone play an mp3 on the air? They're for toys, not broadcasters.

Believe it or not many stations use linear audio for music and compressed audio (i.e., mp3) for commercial content since it can be moved from station to station easily with the internet or flash drive.

Run that grime through an Omnia or Optimod, and it's just annoying.

In fact, save your money on processing, and just use a CBS Volumax, or a Gates Sta-Level.

Overprocessed, mp3-like audio is the big reason why I don't listen to terrestrial radio much anymore for music. If I want to hear grit I'll take my own music and ruin it! Can you just imagine the horror of it all - mp3 audio played on HD or worse - a lower bitrate HD2 channel?

 

[RadioFixerCLE]

There is zero need today for a CD player in a broadcast studio, other than for backup if the computer dies.

I disagree. Some jocks on college radio like to bring their own LPs and CDs from home to supplement the on air music library, so turntables and CD players are very necessary. We used to do that constantly on WSIA....but then again, we were an eclectic bunch and we were encouraged to do so by station management (we still had a sizeable in-house record archive anyway).

Well, that and we also didn't have computers doing music playback in the control room back in 1991. ;D

 

[Eli Polonsky]

For what you'd pay for something like that, you might as well buy an off the shelf Dell computer, put an EMU soundcard in it, and call it a day.

There is zero need today for a CD player in a broadcast studio, other than for backup if the computer dies.

As I previously explained, we're an eclectic student/community college non-comm (with a signal that happens to cover the entire Boston metro) with a huge variety of programs, genres, and formats, and in all cases, the DJ's actually pick their own music! No tight playlists to neatly tuck into a program on a hard drive. We have a large library of thousands of CD's (and also still LP's! But, I digress...) plus DJ's bringing in personal material from their own collections. A track from any one of those thousands of CD's in our library, and more, could be chosen to be aired at any time!

Eventually, we will digitize as much of our music library as possible, but with an all-volunteer staff devoting their limited free time and such a huge library, it will be a long term project. Meanwhile, we're still playing CD's, and we need players that will play them reliably on the air.

The whole station was outfitted with Denon DN-C635's in the early 2000's, and they're now shot (and they weren't very good to begin with). I saw that a few years ago many other stations were having good luck with the Marantz professional models, but it took our management almost three years to consider my suggestion to try them, and then finally install two of them as "trial" units. By the time they finally got around to deciding they wanted more of them, they were discontinued.

We have two on-air studios with three players each. Studio A has the two "trial" discontinued Marantz players working perfectly, and a useless old Denon DN-C635 filling up rack space. Studio B, with two old DN-C635's and one new DN-C640 which crapped out on me the first time I used it yesterday, is not suitable for on-air use unless you have listeners who like songs interrupted in mid-stream with dead air. We still need players that will play CD's!

 

[XTalker]

A question for Xtalker...with terrabite hard drives for $200, why would anyone play an mp3 on the air? They're for toys, not broadcasters.

It is the equivalent of a cassette without the benfit of Dolby. They're for kids to listen to Marylin Manson or hippity-hop noise, not for men with music. An mp3 file is 10% of a .wav, meaning, if you're programming real music with strings, horns, cymbals, vocals, or even a rock 70's symthesyser, like EL&P, it's grainy and gritty. It's not called a "lossy"file for nothing. You lose 90% of the information!

90%! Missing in action, deleted. It may be fine for AM or commercials, but NOT FM programming. Or godforbid, HDFM.

Run that grime through an Omnia or Optimod, and it's just annoying.

In fact, save your money on processing, and just use a CBS Volumax, or a Gates Sta-Level.

I agree about mp3s, but if saving money is an issue, you can buy a very large hard drive for under $100 and store all the mp3s you could ever play. And how much better can it sound on the radio? I suspect the average listener, on the average radio, can never tell the difference between MP3 files and those of broader bandwidth!

You are not programming to the real audiofile - but to the masses! And I will take MP3s over CDs, carts or reel any day of the week!

 

[Studio1]

As with the continued proliferation of junk that is emanating from China, we are seeing the gradual decline of quality over time in the audio and broadcast arena as well.
mp3 has done some amazing things in some areas - it has allowed digital music to become "portable" and easily shared (whether that is a good thing or a bad thing depends on where you sit).
Have we really ever had "quality" sound though?

If we go back to the days of playing 45s and LPs on air, well, they were compressed and frequency limited (due to limitations in the media itself). Tape was reasonable but suffered from high frequency distortion and dropouts. Along came CDs and the arrival of "digital" - which is only ever an approximation of the original waveform.

I agree that many mp3s sound awful, especially low bitrate recordings. I can hear them - my ears are sensitive enough to detect the phasing artefacts and other hacks of the waveform. Sonically, they can be very tiring as well.. after listening to some tracks, my ears are sore.

Getting back to the original question in this post, is there really a good quality CD player made that will actually last? It seems that the emphasis these days is on mass production rather than quality - on the basis that few people will pay for a quality item, therefore it's not worth making one - better to make a cheap one, make thousands of them, and when they crap out, buy another.

It seems that this same philosophy is creeping into broadcast equipment as well. Sad to see, but I suppose that's the way things are now. Just another reason to hang on to quality equipment from the 80s!

 

[RadioFixerCLE]

What would be really cool is if a company like Wheatstone started a line of good, basic CD players. You'd never have to worry about support, repair and parts.



(yes, I'm a bit of a Wheatstone fanboy )

 

[RadioMan203]

What would be really cool is if a company like Wheatstone started a line of good, basic CD players. You'd never have to worry about support, repair and parts.

But would a company of that caliber even bother with such a "basic" product, probably with little margin for profit as well?

 

[Studio1]

What would be really cool is if a company like Wheatstone started a line of good, basic CD players. You'd never have to worry about support, repair and parts.

(yes, I'm a bit of a Wheatstone fanboy )

I think we need to go back to basics here and re-invent the CD player. The words "basic" and "long-lasting" just don't seem to go together.



The biggest issues that I am aware of with CD players are:

Cheap transport mechs including spindle motors and spindle bearings (if they even use them).

Poor laser longevity

Cheap loading mechs.


The best spindle motor I have seen in a CD player is one that Technics made - in the SL-P990. It is basically a three phase motor that uses a magnetic rotor with a fixed stator. Having no brushes, a motor like this could theoretically last forever. What seemed to let them down however were the SMD capacitors they used on the stator board. They tended to leak electrolyte all over the PCB after a number of years, which did awful things to the copper tracks.

Tascam used a similar motor in their 122 MkII cassette deck, and it had the same capacitor issues.

Mechanically, a motor like this, coupled with high quality roller bearings would give years of service. However, the cost is significantly more than a cheap, mass-produced Mabuchi motor from China, which is probably made for about 10 cents.

Next comes the laser diode. Can't find a lot of information on life-expectancy, but then it must be remembered that the performance of a CD player will drop markedly long before the laser diode is totally shot.
As the output of the diode starts to fall, the received RF level drops below the threshold required for optimal playback. Whilst there is some compensation in the circuitry, eventually it gets to the point where the machine will refuse to play or even read the TOC despite the fact that the laser is still operational.

I don't doubt that laser diodes can be manufactured that last for many years. They probably use them in the military for guidance systems and other such uses. Cost of said components would be outrageous too! So, we have a non-mechanical part, but one that still "wears out".

Finally - loading mechs. The majority of CD players have motorised loading trays. These don't give huge problems although after a while the belts stretch and the drawer either refuses to open or close. A new belt will fix the problem. The motors don't seem to give a lot of trouble - then again their duty cycle is very low. I think Denon were on the right track with the DN-961FA and its manually operated loading tray. No fancy motors or gears or belts to give trouble - a spring-loaded opening system, and user assisted closing. Simple, effective, cheap.

In most cases the electronics long outlasts the mechanicals of a CD player. So they aren't an issue. Providing they've been designed properly however, and good quality components have been used.

The upshot of this whole saga is that if someone decided to make a quality CD player with a multi-phase spindle motor, roller bearings, a manual loading mechanism and a laser block straight from the military, it would probably last for 10 years plus - even if it was used every day all day. The cost of such a player - well, it could possibly be more than one of those esoteric, high-end audiophile machines that have valves glowing in the front panel and look like something out of a Star Trek movie.

Would you buy one?