Opinions, please.

My 17 year old Sony CD player (2x oversampling!!) finally died yesterday. Took some struggle to wrench The Shinns CD from it.

It's in my shop w/ my Snells. I have a Yamamha 5-disc chgr. with my HT/Axioms.

Should I:

Buy another cheapo for the shop, or...

Move the Yamaha down there and get something else for the main system? And what might that be??

Muchas Gracias.

I still miss my old dbx CD player from the previous century.

I think you should buy my old Nakamichi CD player for an extremely high price.

Great! And I'll take your Atari, too!

Bob I just threw the old Technics CD player in the garage away last weekend ... it finally bit the dust and I need a replacement also. I'm thinking a cheapo is the way I may go, have you looked at any?

CD as well as DAC technology is extremely mature these days. Its safe to purchase an el' cheapo model. When you hook up the CD player using the digital inputs you are going to be using the DAC that is supplied in the receiver anyways.

I'm not sure what the going rate is on multi-disk CD changers , but considering how there would little demand for them and more "niche" products, they might not be priced competitively as we might like. I'd be interested to see what you end up with.

Bob, I use mega changers, and assuming that you have a fairly large CD collection, the convenience factor makes them the logical candidate. Consider this unit and move the Yamaha down to the shop.

You could try something new like ripping all your CDs to a hard drive (in loss-less format, of course) and getting a music server. Something like a Squeezebox Touch or Olive 4HD?

BTW, where is "Gangland, MA"? Do you mean Lowell?

John, Henry, Rick, Dr. House. Thanks all for the help. Adrian, thanks for nothing.

I know the music server thing is inevitable for us all, but I just wouldn't have the time to do transfers (or the interest). I never download. I like books, not Kindle, miss 12" artwork and ledgible font sizes. Lossless is a huge issue to me and for now, I will still acquire physical source material.

And yes, John, I got hundreds of 'em. I was thinking of a Mega player, especially since they now have a computer keyboard input for programming.

Thanks for the suggestion of the Marantz. Chris (Lampshade) suggested their 5004 5-disc, which was also on my radar. Will let you know wha' happens.

Oh, and FYI from what homework I've done, the # of "priced for plebes" CD players still available is rather pathetic. You can have a super huge selection above $2,500, and once you start going clock-crazy and sniffin' for overheated tube smell, sky's the limit.

Bob, I'm not sure if you were referring to me or Chris at that point, but I didn't suggest a Marantz.

While that 301 disk changer John linked to does look nice and not all that expensive I have to say the sooner you switch to lossless the easier in the long run IMO. While it will take time to rip all your collection the actual time working at it wouldn’t be much longer than loading a multi-disk changer. I pop in a CD and tell EAC to rip and tag it. A few minutes later the computer beeps and kicks the CD out and I drop in another.

Now all my collection stays in it’s cases (not getting scratched) while all my music is at my fingertips. Storable by over 40 criteria like Artist, Album, Genre, Rating, Length, Tempo, Mood, Random (w/o disc change delays), Playlists. . . .

I listen to so much more music now that I can find things easily and configure them the way I want that I would never go back to using a disc player for a standard CD. SACDs and DVD-As are the only things I usually put in my player unless my computers are busy burning DVDs.

Cheers,
Dean

Just curious, Dean, but what format do you rip to? I converted my collection to FLAC, but it doesn't have nearly the metadata options that WMA Lossless has, unless I'm dumb. As far as metadata goes, though, I don't really care beyond artist/album/title, so it's moot for me.

The main problems that make my ripping slower than it could be are 1) sometimes the database info that gets retrieved is incorrect, and 2) I like higher-resolution album art, so I either take the time to search for a high-res version of the art or scan the CD cover myself.

I started out ripping everything to FLAC but when I couldn’t find a car stereo with the features I wanted that also played FLAC I switched to WMA Lossless. I’ve never had any problem using Media Monkey to assign metadata to any file FLAC or otherwise for it’s own internal use. For exporting to the car the same as you “Artist, Album, Title and the like are all that I use.

I do have a lot of stuff come up w/o database entries or album art but I seldom care about the art. Even if the database doesn’t find the tracks I can still rip it based on Artist, Album myself.

The features I really like the most are the things in MM like “Mood” and “Tempo.” Though I have to tag those myself they’re nice for later random playback when I want a better mix than just selecting a “Genre.” I highly doubt I’d be such a fan of ripping if I didn’t have MM to play with.

I haven't even tried ripping with Media Monkey. I do like the program for playback.

I don’t rip with MM I use EAC it will also do WMA lossless along with FLAC. Though EAC can take longer I like it’s error catching capabilities, and some other customizable functions. I only us MM for playback and also for burning audio CD and DVDs, and compiling playlists for my car stereo’s USB and SD card inputs.

Oh, I misunderstood when you were talking about using MM to assign metadata to FLAC files.

I've tried EAC a couple of times, but I always found it to be a pain. I still swear by Easy CD-DA Extractor, but I'm sure a lot of that is simply because it's what I'm used to. It definitely has all of the options I'm looking for, though.