Latest Spectral CD "processor" (aka a CD player)

herb

New Member
Jun 1, 2010
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OAKLAND (MONTCLAIR)
Last Saturday I attended Music Lovers in Berkeley for Dr Johnson's latest. Quite marvelous, but I thought that maybe the outstanding sound was the result of his high quality recording techniques. Jae let me borrow it for a one day in home where I learned that the player makes a huge contribution.

This the most natural sounding piece of audio equipment I have heard. Harmonics are all there, timbre is true. My listening notes say, "nothing added, nothing missing."

Jae is willing to loan it to BAAS/WBF members for audition.

Herb
 

lydon

New Member
Jul 9, 2011
37
1
0
Hello Herb,
Did you have any prior listening experiences with either the SDR-4000 Professional CD Processor or the Berkeley Audio Design, Alpha DAC? Herb I ask this question because those two products run on the SHARC custom software by Analog Devices so there performance at least sonically are nearly the same in quality. But as you know flexibility is another matter all together. I was just wondering if you have had that experience to write about. I appreciate you sharing your first impressions. Thanks!
 

herb

New Member
Jun 1, 2010
19
0
0
OAKLAND (MONTCLAIR)
Did you have any prior listening experiences with either the SDR-4000 Professional CD Processor or the Berkeley Audio Design, Alpha DAC?!
I have heard the Berkeley DAC, but not in my system. Not familiar with the Alpha. This is my first experience with a Spectral CDP, but I have had a preamp and auditioned some amps in the fairly distant past.
My suggestion would be to take Jae up on his free home demo offer and hear it in your own system, especially if you've done the same with the other two.
If you do, please let me and the forum know what you think.

herb
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Last Saturday I attended Music Lovers in Berkeley for Dr Johnson's latest. Quite marvelous, but I thought that maybe the outstanding sound was the result of his high quality recording techniques. Jae let me borrow it for a one day in home where I learned that the player makes a huge contribution.

This the most natural sounding piece of audio equipment I have heard. Harmonics are all there, timbre is true. My listening notes say, "nothing added, nothing missing."

Jae is willing to loan it to BAAS/WBF members for audition.

Herb

Thanks for the info Herb

I'll give Jae a call and maybe I can put some thing together
 

Ron Party

WBF Founding Member
Apr 30, 2010
2,457
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Oakland, CA
I haven't stopped by Music Lovers in a bit but it looks like I'm overdue. I know Hugh thinks quite highly of the Spectral player. I know they also picked up the Da Vinci gear. And the last time I was there they had just got a pair of Philip's Vivid speakers. Oh, the toys they get to play with.
 

Phelonious Ponk

New Member
Jun 30, 2010
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OK...I'm confused. Why would a CDP need USB?

Tim
 

Rupunzell

Well-Known Member
Dec 26, 2010
20
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346
This is a re-post of what I have written about, "lack of digital inputs" on the SDR4000SL.
To call a CD only player is a dinosaur is to believe the billions of CD produced are not worthy of their
sonic offering and the music they contain is irrelevant.

Think carefully about any new technology offering and how it might actually improve your
life rather than what that technological widget promises to offer.

The experience of using virtual media is inherently different than physical media.
The human brain develops a map of it's physical surroundings over time and usage.
This is why one can walk up to a shelf of CDs, books or other physical media and almost
instantly locate the object desired. In virtual media, one looks up the desired object via a
menu on screen. The experience is quite different and not always better for some users.

Other examples, try using a touch screen with your eyes closed. Not so easy to do?
Fighter jet control sticks have distinct finger buttons for specific operation, this is done to allow
the pilot to use these controls by feel (brain map) with no visual observation of these control buttons.

There was a time when dinosaurs were believed to be cold blooded.
In time, with more detailed study, improved research tools and understanding,
it was discovered that dinosaurs were warm blooded.
Much like the "Dinosaur CD" one day, a listener might discover sonic delights within them.
The SDR4000SL is an instrument that can allow such discoveries to be made.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The hard reality is CD disc players are far from a dead end product. Much like Vinyl, there are Billions of CDs in the world today and like Vinyl, many of those recordings are not going to be re-issued into a different media.

The common answer to this fact, simply rip the CD's into a music server and there is your complete music library at the touch of your iPad. In reality, it is far from being that simply.

What the Audiophile market simply does not understand is delivering the very best possible playback from historically significant recordings is important if you interest is in the music and not a visceral sonic experience or indulge in the latest digital playback fashion.

What I will say, the SDR4000SL has playback quality very similar to Hi res files. We know this from real world experience. What is wrong with a 44.1Khz CD player that has the ability to play back recordings with such sound quality?

Today, there are a large number of high quality Phonograph/Vinyl playback systems, why has the market decided Vinyl is worth the investment?

As long as CD's exist in the world of music, there will be a need for a high quality CD player that can extract the last bit of accurate information from these recordings.

The belief that high resolution files alone will cure all sonic ills is a fantasy driven by marketing. High quality sound reproduction is not that simple. As much as Audiophile's don't like the idea, high quality sound reproduction requires a complete system approach.

For those who enjoy mixing and matching their music system components, what is your point of reference/ How do you know for fact the resultant sound from your musical system is the actual sound that happened during any specific recording?

And no, there is no digital input on the SDR4000SL for a host of reasons. To accommodate this feature would completely alter the system configuration and compromise the system clock accuracy and noise in the overall system.

The SDR4000SL was not designed with features driven by marketing impulses, it is deigned to deliver the highest accuracy in playback of 44.1Khz CD's with good user ergonomics and nothing more.



Bernice



because without a USB input, this thing is a dinosaur.
you can't run a music server through it.
 

Phelonious Ponk

New Member
Jun 30, 2010
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because without a USB input, this thing is a dinosaur.
you can't run a music server through it.

Ahhh...then it is a DAC with an added optical drive. That could come in handy if the drive in the server ever broke. :)

Tim
 

Phelonious Ponk

New Member
Jun 30, 2010
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Great post, Bernice, but the server contingent has a few answers:

The experience of using virtual media is inherently different than physical media.
The human brain develops a map of it's physical surroundings over time and usage.

It's a reasonable point, but for me it is trumped by typing in "Pork Pie Hat" and instantly having all 10 versions of that tune pulled from my library and qued up, ready to play. YMMV.

The common answer to this fact, simply rip the CD's into a music server and there is your complete music library at the touch of your iPad. In reality, it is far from being that simply.

No, it actually is that simple, though we audiophiles have an incredible talent for complicating things.

What I will say, the SDR4000SL has playback quality very similar to Hi res files.

I agree completely. This is because the well-recorded, well-mastered Redbook file has playback quality very similar to Hi res files. My ears tell me this, and so does the available science.

As long as CD's exist in the world of music, there will be a need for a high quality CD player that can extract the last bit of accurate information from these recordings.

Well, there will, at least, be a need for optical drives. And CDPs for those who want to hang on to their old archiving methods.

As much as Audiophile's don't like the idea, high quality sound reproduction requires a complete system approach.

Amen. But I think audiophiles like the idea fine, they just like to do it the hard way.

The SDR4000SL was not designed with features driven by marketing impulses, it is deigned to deliver the highest accuracy in playback of 44.1Khz CD's with good user ergonomics and nothing more.

I'm sure it's a fine CDP, but...and this is the real point for audiophiles...can it really deliver better 44.1 than ripping that data to a hard drive using software the checks and re-checks and verifies until it has the most accurate copy of that CD that can be made? More accurate in many cases than the CD itself can play back in real time? In ripping my cd collection, I had a couple of drop-outs where I had to go back and re-rip (with different software) to solve the problem. I had many cases in which flaws on the CD were cured in the ripping. And of course upon playback, the same process happens again - the system error-checks and makes sure that what is being sent to the DAC is exactly what's on the drive.

These differences are not small. They are not a magical expansion of the sound stage (I get that from changing the toe-in on my speakers) they are the difference between an error and perfect playback.

The server is a pain for as long as it takes to get everything into the system. From there, the user experience is a choice. If you like pulling physical media from a wall of cds, enjoy. But from an audio perspective? The properly ripped cd playing back through a DAC of equal quality is better.

Tim
 

ack

VIP/Donor & WBF Founding Member
May 6, 2010
6,774
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Boston, MA
Some folks, like myself, have a real need to put digital music on a server, and it's got nothing to do with marketing - we simply want to get rid of all the mega bookcases filled with CDs we have in our living room. It's really that astoundingly simple.
 

Phelonious Ponk

New Member
Jun 30, 2010
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Some folks, like myself, have a real need to put digital music on a server, and it's got nothing to do with marketing - we simply want to get rid of all the mega bookcases filled with CDs we have in our living room. It's really that astoundingly simple.

Yeah, I desperately wanted to get the physical media put away as well, though I kept it. I threw out all the jewel boxes and stored the discs in binders. The convenience, the arguably better sound, and the recovery of several damaged discs was just a bonus.

Tim
 

KeithR

VIP/Donor
May 7, 2010
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Encino, CA
"To call a CD only player is a dinosaur is to believe the billions of CD produced are not worthy of their
sonic offering and the music they contain is irrelevant."

Actually I disagree---this isn't an analog vs. digital thing. CDs are going extinct, whether audiophiles like it or not. Sonically, a server by definition can be superior anyways. I find it funny the folks paying several hundred dollars for old mofi or dccs--they should be burning them and selling their entire collections -as they aren't going to hold value like rare LPs.

I have never seen an audiophile switch back to CDs from a music server. The only people backing CDs are the people who haven't setup a server yet. They are incredibly easy to setup--a Mac Mini running Amarra/Pure Music with NAS is all it takes. It just takes time to burn your collection (once). And hi rez is now basically a dload type format anyways.

15-20k for a cdp such as this one is even more ludicrous seeing where technology is going.

Respectfully,

KeithR
 

mimesis

New Member
Sep 26, 2010
86
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Having tried multiple music servers, including an iTunes one, a dB Poweramp one, the Olive in my home and the Sooloos and Qsonix at a store, I have been singularly unimpressed with the way the software manages classical music tagging. Finding a selection and keeping the play order of a multi-movement piece is a headache. And this is coming from someone who started with the first generation iPod and other music players years back.

I have a large CD library and have been adding more - in the event that physical formats are replaced by a cloud and ownership is transformed into a service, a state I would not be enchanted with.

For this reason, a CD only player still makes eminent sense. Certainly one might argue that a DAC function is nice but it is hard to say that it is a must in a CD player.

As far as where technology goes - it's possible we get downloadable high res but seeing as how BluRay is encrypted and HD Tracks is incredibly limited in its offerings - and the true resolution of many tracks is possibly problematic - I wouldn't bet that the future is higher res as opposed to lower res.

I can spend $1 per disc to have it ripped (properly) and spend 5 grand, or spend hundreds of hours of my time to tag things correctly, systematically and rationally, or enjoy a CD and take in the music and leave off obsessing with technology.

William

I should add and in all fairness, I do have a DAC and a Trinnov DSP room analyzer so I can go back and forth and take advantage of a DAC with video.
 

Old Listener

New Member
Jul 18, 2010
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SF Bay area
naturelover.smugmug.com
Just make an appropriate choice of tools

Having tried multiple music servers, including an iTunes one, a dB Poweramp one, the Olive in my home and the Sooloos and Qsonix at a store, I have been singularly unimpressed with the way the software manages classical music tagging. Finding a selection and keeping the play order of a multi-movement piece is a headache. And this is coming from someone who started with the first generation iPod and other music players years back.

I found JRiver media Center to be the best tool for ripping, tag editing, library management and playback for my collection from ~2500 CDs. % 70 of those CDs were of classical music. I wrote about my experience here:

http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-path-to-pc-audio-playback.html

I haven't played music directly from a CD in several years.

You mentioned the difficulty of getting movements to play in order. In JRiver media Center, it is a trivial matter. You just adjust the sort order in which the files are listed. I use

Composer, Work name, Artist and finally (Track) name

as the sequence of values for sorting.

Here is a screenshot of a view I use for classical music

http://naturelover.smugmug.com/Other/JRiverscreenshots/MC-12-iTunes-4-skin/637838734_Ss77E-L.jpg

If you want to stay with playing CDs, you can. I don't think that it is necessary even for classical music.

Bill
 

Rupunzell

Well-Known Member
Dec 26, 2010
20
0
346
Any further words are going to end up as fodder for more less than constructive or worth while comments. Better to go to a good spectral dealer like Goodwin's High end and do the sonic comparison between your idolized music server and the SDR4000SL and decide for yourself.

All else is conjecture and speculation. While you do this comparison, try keeping your personal sonic preferences out of the comparison (which is going to be extremely difficult for many Audiophiles).

As for ripped CDs being better and more the actual CD itself.. how do you know for fact the data corrected file is accurate? How can lost information be accurately recovered? This is much like the believe that oversampling creates more information than was actually recorded..

Perpetual motion has been proven to be false.. so far. Think Maxwell's Demon..


Bernice


No, it actually is that simple, though we audiophiles have an incredible talent for complicating things.

Amen. But I think audiophiles like the idea fine, they just like to do it the hard way.

I'm sure it's a fine CDP, but...and this is the real point for audiophiles...can it really deliver better 44.1 than ripping that data to a hard drive using software the checks and re-checks and verifies until it has the most accurate copy of that CD that can be made? More accurate in many cases than the CD itself can play back in real time? In ripping my cd collection, I had a couple of drop-outs where I had to go back and re-rip (with different software) to solve the problem. I had many cases in which flaws on the CD were cured in the ripping. And of course upon playback, the same process happens again - the system error-checks and makes sure that what is being sent to the DAC is exactly what's on the drive.


Tim
 

FrantzM

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
6,455
29
405
Hi

I use Foobar and JRMC. The simplicity of foobar is welcome but the fine grained control JRMC provides is exemplary. I have moved to the server model and will not look back. Spectral CDP is good but this is dying breed. There will be fewer and fwer CDP and Cd is on ots way out.
a CDP is a transport and a DAC. A music server cando anything a the best transport can and more while being less expesnive. THe approach allows one to focus on the DaC where truly the action is these days. The convenience and the performance afforded by music server actually enhance the musical experience. More it is stupendously simple to implement. To rip a CD, just play it once and that is it , it is saved and accessible at the ouch of a screen :) You want to play music from the 80's a few key strokes .... all albums by a given Artist .. a few more .. What is there not to like? .. Sonic performance is at least equal and routinely superior to the best transports.. I don't know of a High Resolution transport by the way . Spectral will make this thing , sell a few and retire it quickly to concentrate on DACs.

Audiophiles have lost to Audio files (borrowed from a Wired Magazine article about Bang and Olufsen)
 

docvale

Well-Known Member
Mar 21, 2011
542
53
940
Briarcliff Manor, NY
Any further words are going to end up as fodder for more less than constructive or worth while comments. Better to go to a good spectral dealer like Goodwin's High end and do the sonic comparison between your idolized music server and the SDR4000SL and decide for yourself.

All else is conjecture and speculation. While you do this comparison, try keeping your personal sonic preferences out of the comparison (which is going to be extremely difficult for many Audiophiles).

As for ripped CDs being better and more the actual CD itself.. how do you know for fact the data corrected file is accurate? How can lost information be accurately recovered? This is much like the believe that oversampling creates more information than was actually recorded..

Perpetual motion has been proven to be false.. so far. Think Maxwell's Demon..


Bernice

Hi Bernice,

I can agree with your point, but I think that the concern coming from this thread is slightly different. I don't think anybody could tell the 4000SL is a piece of crap as it doesn't convert music from a music server. Nor anyone is saying that a file loaded on a server is necessarily better than something printed on a redbook CD.
Personally, I auditioned to the Pro version of the 4000, in a Spectral-Magico Mini system, and the sound was gorgeous. Moreover, in that same system I compared the 4000Pro with a dCS Scarlatti and, playing normal CDs I preferred (based on minimal details, eh :) ) the Spectral.
Notwithstanding, apart of the speculations regarding the quality tout-court, I admit the incredible comfort derived by the use of a music server. I switched as a matter of necessity (I moved to the US from Italy and I couldn't move my entire collection of discs), and, honestly, I couldn't go back.
So, I think that if the 4000SL displayed a digital input (USB, SPDIF, whatever) would jump at the top of my dreams. Now, it's "just" the finest CD-only player I've ever listened to, but, in my dream-system, I would try to place something that could allow me to browse thousands of files through my iPhone, as I'm doing daily. :)
 

fas42

Addicted To Best
Jan 8, 2011
3,973
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NSW Australia
A point that people should bear in mind is that it is "dangerous" to hold data, the music on a server, in a form that is forever easily erasible. There are nightmares occurring now in the scientific world where precious scientific data is stored on read/write media which can no longer be easily read for various reasons, look at the mini panic now about significant master tapes in the audio world.

This is one reason that paper is a big winner, vinyl is also excellent, and CDs may in turn prove to be life savers down the track ...

Frank
 

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