Sir Stereophile,
BTW, do you know any device to make CD sound like a turntable? Just curious.
rascal- The closest you will get to analog using the digital format is to use the DCS Elgar DAC + DCS Verdi transport. It converts ordinary 16-bit 44Khz cds to DSD meaning SACD. It comes at a price: USD 39T! This is the only equipment w/c can convert regular cds to DSD. No other product can, hence its cost.
I have heard SACDs in a reference SACD player like the MF Trivista SACD player w/c costs 400T. This was in a reference MF sysytem using MF KW pre-amp, MF KW-1000wpc monoblocks, 250T worth of XLO interconnect/spkr wires, B&W 800 Signature spkrs. It's close but still not the same. Add to that the limited titles. An ordinary 'redbook' cd will not soud like an sacd unless you use the prohibitive DCS gear. The owner himself of this MF sysytem has an MF M-1 ttable. When we compared the 2 formats, he concluded that analog was better. At least he has both formats.
But you can get the analog sound cheaply, by using a ttable at your price point. I myself use a Rotel 971 cd player, passing thru a Monarchy Audio anti-jitter DIP, then thru an MF A324 192khz upsampling DAC. Very nice sound compared to ordinary cd player, but left in the dust by my Technics ttable with Shure M-447 cart. You will say why not use tube output cd players with DAC. But after I heard a reference SACD player(the MF Trivista) with associated gear at
4.5M , and it still does not come close to analog. So I did not bother upgrading my digital front-end. I'm at that point where I'm done with gear upgrading and just look for vinyl w/c I like. I hardly use my digital gears, except to warm up my amps prior to listening to analog, or when I'm just tamad and want to listen to music with a remote.
I agree, going into analog has its rituals: cleaning the LPs, storing them properly, setting up the cartridge on the ttable. But the advantage of analog, is that you can TWEAK your front-end. If you dont like the sound, you can adjust/re-align your cartdrige. If that doesn't work, you can change the cartridge and yet use the same ttable. You can also change the phonostage if you like, not to mention the cables. You can't do that to a cd player. Its basically open tray-plop cd- then close n play. Besides that, there are a lot of material which never made it to digital.
Bottomline: It's the
analog sound!