An experiment in source component vs source material...

Here's an interesting experiment whose outcome might surprise you and even save you some money. Try this and tell me your results:

What I want to do is compare source components to source material, to see which one has greater effect on overall sound quality. Take a poorly recorded CD and an excellently recorded CD. If you have the resources, get a second cheap CD player, even a CD Walkman will work.

First, connect your everyday CD Player (the good one) and play the bad and good recordings...good sounds good, and bad sounds awful, right?

Now, connect the CD Walkman or other discount player and play both recordings....hmmm, good still sounds, well, good....and bad, as you might expect, still sounds bad (though probably to a lesser degree).

What is this suppose to illustrate? It may show you that source material has far more influence on your system then does source component; I think you will find that the "budget" player will sound pretty impressive with the excellent grade recording. Sure, it won't equal your high-end player, but I think you'll be surprised how well it performs. Taking this into account, before you spring big bucks for a new CD Player, make sure its not poor recordings that are making your system as a whole, sound bad. More importantly, don't fool yourself into thinking that a higher-end player is going to "fix" your poorly engineered recordings...

food for thought.

So how do you propose to get audiophile grade recordings of all of your favorites, while everyone else can't? Of course the software is critical, but we're all in the same boat with regard to the recorded quality of our musical selections. Unless you just want to buy Telarc disks because they're recorded wonderfully, and couldn't care less about the music itself, then what's to be learned from this? We can't record the music, you know? But of course you're right, the source material is paramount.

I think that is a good comparison as long as it is taken into account that both are "modern" devices built with similar technology. My real shocker came when my wife and I A/B'd a 13 year old Philips made player vs. the JVC we had at the time. On the same material the differences were incredible.