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The Daily Insight

Can a 20 year old CD player compete with the new ones?

Author

Daniel Foster

Published Apr 22, 2026

Can a 20 year old CD player compete with the new ones?

It’s true that the SQ of my Denon is very good, but the DAC inside is probably obsolete. How could a 20 year old DAC compete against the new ones that we can find in player like the CD5004 ? The old Denon CD players do indeed have a nice magic to them.

Is the Sony cdp-970 compact disc player free?

All files are provided under strict licence and reproduction without prior permission or for financial gain is strictly prohibited. If you have additional documentation please consider donating a copy to our free archive. top, i’ve got one and it sounds superlative.

What was the name of my first CD player?

It was called the Philips CD-101/Magnavox FD-1010. Until I got my Sony XA777ES SACD player, it was the best CD player I’d ever heard. No digital out (in fact it had captive RCA cables, IIRC), and no remote but it was built like a tank; very compact, only a 14-bit DAC, but it used a very simple filter on the output.

What was the performance of a CD player in 1990?

Indeed, by 1990 you had 18 or 20 bit and 8x oversampling CD players where the noise was inaudible and distortion was at absurdly low levels and the FRs were by design utterly razor flat, between 1984 when I had a 14 bit Marantz machine and 1989 when I got a newer Marantz the performance had improved massively !

It’s true that the SQ of my Denon is very good, but the DAC inside is probably obsolete. How could a 20 year old DAC compete against the new ones that we can find in player like the CD5004 ? The old Denon CD players do indeed have a nice magic to them.

Indeed, by 1990 you had 18 or 20 bit and 8x oversampling CD players where the noise was inaudible and distortion was at absurdly low levels and the FRs were by design utterly razor flat, between 1984 when I had a 14 bit Marantz machine and 1989 when I got a newer Marantz the performance had improved massively !

What kind of CD player do I have?

At the time I was considering a nice player from Cambridge, a new top of the line Sony or Marantz or the Denon. I ended up with a lightly used Denon DCD 1560 CD Player.

What makes a Denon dcd-600ne CD player so good?

What you hear is a cleaner, more detailed, accurate sound. The DCD-600NE features one Optical output to connect to the digital input of an amplifier or AV receiver. The DCD-600NE features a metal chassis to achieve high mechanical stability to suppress vibration cause by disc rotation.