DVD Player & Multi-CDs

[yipee]

Ok we have decided to buy the Denon 3805, DVD 5900 but what do you do about playing more than one CD? Do you buy a multi-disc CD Player too?

Yipee

 

[JVC]

Yes..........
Is it THAT much trouble to get up and change a disc?

I have a dedicated cd player, that has a single drawer and a 6 disc magazine. After I had the player about a month, I never did use the magazine again. That was 10 yrs. ago. I decided I listen to one disc at a time, and the little bit of exercise of getting up was good for me. I'm in my 50's, and I haven't gotten too lazy to change a disc yet.

 

[Rob Babcock]

There are circumstances when a changer is nice. If you're doing the dishes, cleaning, or doing something like that it's nice to be able to just load it up. Also nice for discs where you only want to hear a few songs each. The 5900 will make a magnificent CD player, but if your household is anything like mine, a changer will be necessary to insure domestic tranquility (ie my family insists on having one!).

I recently replaced my failing CD carousel with a DVD carousel, but I'm not wholly satisfied. It's a Philips, the one with upsampling for CD music. The problem is that it sounds radically different with the upsampling engaged, more so than you'd expect. It sounds pretty good w/upsampling, but not very good at all with it turned off. This shouldn't be. Also, it's very, very, very slow to recognize a disc, and the real kiss of death: it isn't very reliable with DVD-R/DVD+R. I burn a lot of DVD discs of various types, so this is a bummer.

BTW, I despise the magazine-style changers. I'd only have a carousel, but that's just me. YMMV.

 

[yipee]

Thank you for the Reply Rob. Maybe more advice is needed. What we want is either a DVD player with DVD audio, SACD, MP3, CDR etc. capabilities or a CD Player with the same. We will be using this for music only. That is why we want either a DVD changer or CD changer.
Any advice would be appreciated

Thank you

 

[m1abrams]

Just another option would be a music server type device.

Now before the Audiophiles out there jump all over this, there are music server devices that play uncompressed audio and/or lossless compressed audio.

One I have and have been very happy with is the Slimp3 Squeezebox. All my music is encoded in a lossless format (FLAC) and the Squeezebox is hooked up to my receiver via SPDIF. You could also hook it up to an external DAC if you want. I know a few people hook them up to some very pricey DACs.

Downside though is you need a computer in the house to act as the server and you need to rip your music to the harddisk. I highly recommend using a lossless format that way you only do the ripping process once, since it is lossless you can transcode to other formats without generation loss. Granted for people with large music libaries this can be a core and require a large harddisk or disks. If you make it a goal to rip all your cds, you would be surprised how fast and painless it can be if you just get into a routine of doing a couple a day.

 

[Rob Babcock]

I certainly won't jump you about the music server- I think it's a great idea. But I don't see it replacing the carousel anytime soon, if for no other reason than the fact that right now no computer solution exists that can play back SACD. There's no legal way to rip the DSD signal nor DVD-As. Besides, sometimes you want to rip the plastic off your new CD & just throw it in the player without first having to rip it. Yeah, your server can have a CD-ROM drive, but I've not seen one yet that was as elegant & simple as a CD player.

So far I haven't seen any DVD changer that is an user friendly as a CD changer. They all seem to recognize discs slowly, skip slowly and many lack the most basic programming features. Horror of horrors, some even require the TV to be on to use basic menu features!

What I would realllly love is a good solid 5 Disc Carousel Universal Player. Something that worked just like a CD changer but with the ability to play anything small, round & shiny. Then I could go from 3 players down to one!

 

[m1abrams]

Rob - See that is why the Music Server is an ideal solution for someone with a very high-end single disc DVD player.

You have the nice DVD player for movies, SACD, DVD-Audio, and the occasional just pop in a disc and play.

Then use the music server for the multi-disc player replacement.

 

[Rob Babcock]

I guess one final comment I'd make is that it seems like the 5900 is a lot of player to mate up to a 3805. While there's nothing technically wrong with that, and while I'd love to have 5900, I think it's a bit more $ than I'd spend on a player, only because I think by waiting a little bit most of the technology will filter down to the cheaper ones. Of course, if you have the money you may as well enjoy it, and the '5900 is certainly built like a battleship. It has DVI output, which should future proof it to a degree.

Mainly, I'd point out that you could buy a '2200 instead and save enough to buy a decent computer/music server. Or a 2900 and buy a really nice CD carousel.

Yikes! Trying to talk someone out of buying "the Best" gives me a weird feeling! Ignore the last couple paragraphs!