I have just listened to a CD!

Tonight my aging Marantz CD85 CD player was put into storage making way for a Rabbit.

On route to the cupboard under the stairs I plugged it in, switched it on, connected my beyer' 'phones and pressed play.

I have not played a CD for years. If I buy a cd it gets ripped to media player and put on a shelf. Even the car has a usb port!

But this circa 1984 CD Player blew me away! HiFi is dead! I don't listen to music anymore. It's always playing via the PC and speakers but I never put a cd on and listen to it.

Maybe the cd player doesn't go in the cupboard. Maybe I will use it as an over-sized IPOD and start listening o my CD's again. And, maybe one day I'll play a record again!

MZ

PS The CD that I played was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - :e Love In

If you want a real treat, try vinyl.

I can't a record to fit into my computer's slot load drive, nor my dvd player... I must be doing it wrong.

Absolutely,

The Rega 3 is on the kitchen side right now!

All I need is a Phono amp as my old Amp is dead and Musical Fidelity are quoting £399 for a "Tune Up"

Any suggestions as I haven't bought any HiFi since 1985!

MZ

I had a Rega 3 before I bought my Roksan. Good deck. I'm not current with the modern stuff either. These people do some nice Rega upgrades and phono amps.

Shame it costs so much to fix the amp, they had a great reputation going back.It has been a while since my hi-fi days,the last deck I had was a Logic Tempo. PerhapS a NAD pre and power would be a good match for such an iconic turntable.
Regards
Chris

"Tonight my aging Marantz CD85 CD player was put into storage making way for a Rabbit"


Did the Rabbit come from Ann Summers

I have a 15 year old Marantz CD player here in Colombo - sounds bloody great. I also have a Rega Planar 3 turntable too, but that's in my mother's garage along with my collection of 2,000+ albums. Records might sound great but they're a bloody pain to transport (particularly 2,000 of them) - and store.

What's a rabbit, btw? And - more critically - what's an Ann Summers' rabbit?!

I've still got an old Marantz CD 52 Mk2 which still works and sounds good

I use a Rotel RA-01 amp with it, probably about 8 years old. They
work well together.

CD sounds fine (mostly) on my old Linn Karik. I worry though that I still prefer vinyl on a Linn Sondek LP12 & play records just about every day.

ManixZero .... any phono amp is better than no phono amp. Buy a few hifi magazines (you remember those!!) and then spend some more time and cash on Ebay. There's lots of great second hand gear about. If you find some loon bidding too much against you on a Linn Kairn pre-amp, it's probably me.

Andrew

I've got a Technics CD player that has just celebrated it's 19th birthday. Still as good as the day it was un-boxed and was one of the first to boast an optical output.

SWMBO keeps trying to bin it, but it still survives!

I use a Pro-Ject Phono Box link to transfer vinyl to the PC. It might do what you want.

Sounds to me like you may have either no dedicated sound card or one of the vast majority on the market geared towards gaming.

A good, audiophile type sound card with high quality digital/analogue and analogue/digital converters and proper shielding makes a massive difference when encoding audio.

If I were you I would take a look at the range made my Asus; I have a Xonar D2 which is just excellent, and the newish Xonar Essence is supposed to be even better.

A big upgrade to the sound on a PC is a pair of active nearfield monitors instead of PC speakers i.e. the type sold by music shops for home recording studios.

e.g. Fostex

or for 80 quid M-Audio

I bought a surprisingly decent budget Marantz amp from Richer Sounds a few years ago, has Tuner/Phono/Cassette/CD/etc inputs and sounds pretty good to me (a lot better than the cheap all-in-one it replaced).

Shortly after I bought a "Cambridge Audio" (who now seem to be a Richer Sounds own brand) CD player. From new it had an annoying hum from the transformer, then it developed what I can only describe as a death rattle! I'll replace it with a Marantz one matching the amp sometime as that way I can use the amp remote to control both.

I use an ancient GEC direct drive turntable with a new cartridge/stylus and a GEC tuner from the same era. You really do hear a lot more detail on vinyl than CD, especially on older albums which were mixed for vinyl.

I don't mourn the loss of cassettes, but a properly handled vinyl record on a properly maintained turntable will knock spots off a CD for pure quality.