DVD players ( Present Market Glut) as a CD Player?

[decanterlime]

I recently obtained a lovely, good quality single play multi medium DVD /MP3 player. Its like new, very silver with mirror panels and my intention was to have this as a slave CD player ( to play mostly unattended during my free time as I do with my masses of cassettes) for £2 with remote and batteries at a car boot sale.
I was assured it worked fine de dum dee dum by the nice lady selling it basking in the pleasant seaside sun!
So I got it back and plugged it in after a few safety checks. The carriage was stuck and it would not switch off. I dissmantled it and sorted it.
It now works fine like my Philips CD618 and Technics MASH player.
Many people have legions of CD's which never get played like people used to have rows of unread encyclopaedias gracing their front rooms' of yesteryear. So my nature is to play them...crikey they cost me enough!!
The only problem with DVD players used to just play CDs is they do not behave like a CD player...you have to let it load up and start on track 1 and then advance it quickly to say track 11 and quickly pause it by pressing the pause button ( if like me you DJ style play different CD players at the same time to be selective of tracks)
Well its now on input 3 of my CD player stack so I can definately say it sounds good and will play MP3 too...
It seems such a shame there are millions of DVD players in Cash Converters and their likes for sale at~ £10. Are they so maligned and redundant? I think there is a use for them.
Mark

[richard]

Temporarily, I'm using an old Sony DVD/CD player just for CDs. I was surprised: it behaves fine and the sound has been satisfactory.

I think that the major issue with using a DVD player for CDs is whether the machine has a visual display or not. If it doesn't, and you need to have a TV hooked up just to see which track you have selected, that's a major bummer even if the thing sounds good. So, my advice is that if your DVD player has no built-in display, don't bother trying to use it exclusively for CDs.

[decanterlime]

Temporarily, I'm using an old Sony DVD/CD player just for CDs. I was surprised: it behaves fine and the sound has been satisfactory.

Yes I was like you to to view it as a temporary measure..but I think it has earned its place now despite its shortfalls. The sound quality is good.
Mark

[stratokaster83]

When DVD was still a hot technology, there were many high quality DVD players where some attention was paid to the quality of Audio CD playback. Some were even considered respectable audiophile units on their own.

I remember Pioneer DV757 (?) and Sony DVP-NS900 (?) being recommended as two particularly good sounding DVD players. They were considered better than similar units from more audiophile-oriented brands such as Marantz, Arcam, Cambridge Audio etc.

[hatehifi]

I use a Sony DVP-NS305 kept on 24/7 (has a standby feature) and it 'sounds' great.

Cheers!

[pde2000]

The SACD player ive got is a philips dvd home entertainment all in one that a neighbor was throwing away.  Sounds great.  My mum uses a dvd player for cd's too, and a panasonic boom box.

DVD is a very versatile medium (puntastic).  They say blueray is better.

[GP49]

I'm using a Sony DVD player, too.  Got it for $5 at the local charity shop benefitting spay and neuter programs
for feral cats.     It came without remote, but the Dollar Tree store had a universal
remote control that could be programmed for it, at ...A Dollar.  So it cost me six bucks.

It sounds fine.  A front panel display is a MUST.  I have other DVD players around, that don't have one,
and couldn't use them in the audio system.  This Sony has one, and the ability to select tracks directly
via keypad on the remote.  There is enough of a time delay between initiation and start of play to do it,
or I can select a track at disc load, and it will advance there when the disc has been initiated.  It also
has controls on the front panel (but no keypad), which some units. requiring a remote, lack.

It actually sounds close enough to the Philips/Magnavox CD player that used to be in the system before
trying out the Sony DVD player, that I haven't put back the Magnavox.  Source limitations inherent in the
Red Book CD format may have something to do with that, but what is keeping it there is being able to
play music DVDs and DVD-A in it, without yet another piece of equipment competing for inputs on the
preamplifier.

[willbewill]

Some also have a digital out and so make very cost effective transports.

[bluetomgold]

IME they don't sound very good (even as a transport using the digital out) and they are usually slow to read disks and respond to controls. I've tried it with quite a few DVD players and different DACs and always found my CD player works much better as a transport - both sonically and ergonomically. I really wanted it to work when Pioneer introduced those cheap "universal" players (i.e. SACD etc.) but in the end I had to accept that it just sounded s**t and went back to a late 80s Marantz CD player (which cost about £15 and sounded great).

I'm all for finding a cheap way to do it but it's wrong to assume that all digital outputs are the same... my Meridian 602 is one of the best CD transports ever made and it sounds as different to my Sony DVD as my Lenco does to a cheap midi system turntable. I tried it recently and couldn't get through a whole track on the Sony, even using the Meridian DAC.

YMMV, but personally I've always found that there's no substitute for a proper CD player, preferably with one of the better Philips mechanisms.

[stratokaster83]

All digital sources are not the same indeed, and to be honest SPDIF in its consumer version is a much worse protocol than I2S which is used inside a CD player. Unless you use a reclocking DAC, obviously, then it doesn't matter.

That said, there are very good sounding DVD players, with carefully implemented digital and analog sections. But a $20 LG or even a $50 Sony isn't one of them.

BTW, Pioneer's universal players were fantastic, at least those equipped with iLink, especially when used with an iLink-compatible multichannel decoder/amplifier. But iLink is now dead, simply because both high resolution audio standards it was used with (DVD-Audio and SACD) are also dead. Later cheap units were no bueno. It really is impossible to make a good sounding multichannel audio player for $150 when a high-end stereo DAC chip alone may cost as high as $15.

[decanterlime]

Yes I think you are right Tom. This DVD does have a front display and so will be put to work like a slave flash unit as in photography lighting.
Like I said its a strange elaborate affair to cue your chosen track...but getting back to the intent I can't stand to see piles of good technology going to waste like it is.
You know when VHS VCR's first came out? I can remember going on a waiting list for a particular Ferguson model at a certain retailer. They were expensive and demands for them was sky high.
Mark

[bluetomgold]

I can't stand to see piles of good technology going to waste like it is.

I'm with you there Mark!

Unless you use a reclocking DAC, obviously, then it doesn't matter.

Not sure about this... I used a relatively recent Cambridge Dacmagic for a while, with lots of different digital sources (DVD, PC, CDP), I know it's not exactly high end but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to reclock. All the sources sounded different, and my CDP still came out on top (even compared to hi-res files on the PC). In fact the PC sounded worse via USB than optical so I gave up on hi-res!

[Kent T]

A major other disadvantage of DVD transports is slower loading a CD table of contents. Players with two lasers do better in this regard. The universal Pioneers with SACD/DVD-A/DVD video are good inexpensive options.