Well I can speak personally, as I have my content on the streaming services - and streaming doesn’t pay much at all but it does build up… but there are potentially less middle men than physical media. Streaming is a great leveller and is a lot easier to get your music out there to be enjoyed by your community.
In my experience, the most lucrative format for artists are digital downloads.
So all is not what it appears
I have no doubt that barriers to entry are lower.
However, not sure that means that a sustainable income follows. In fact I would guess the opposite. To live from the profession via streaming, requires high critical mass. The abundance of choice, creates a fragmented income stream. Wood and trees.
Or to put it another way-the paucity of new bands who make it to mainstream seems illustrative-and artists like Taylor swift et al receive the lions share of streaming income.
But this I guess has little to do with cd players
In my EU area some bargains to be had.
Boxset especially
Few € is not unusually pr/disc new.
S/H lots are bargains
I agree vinyl prices are sometime crazy, if so I just get the CD.
Streaming and ripping is not for me, and I believe this count for many oldtimers.
Streaming is nice to explore new music before a record purchase.
A funny thing, I met a guy which never, I repeat NEVER have heard a vinyl LP, his age is late twenties.
The problem with cd these days is it’s limited quantities.
44.1 really doesn’t cut it these day’s, especially when you can upsample it and straight away hear the better quantities you get.
Obviously SACD helps, and without the ability to play these, then i just wouldn’t bother.
But as with all this, it comes back down to mechanism.
SACD mechanisms are very hard to come by, and with D&M also pulling the plug on supplying these to the market, then the choice is not much.
Making your own is probably the only way going forward, but this will obviously cost loads to do, and i couldn’t see Naim going down that road.
Also obviously you are limited with SACD to the built in dac, analogue stage, etc, as you can’t use it as transport into any old dac. That is not 100% true, as some SACD transports will do that, but only with it’s matching dac.
Also no one was expecting Naim to bring out a turntable, so i guess you can never say never.
Wan’t the “Naim” turntable nothing more then a rebadged Clearaudio turntable ?
Your opinion ofcourse Dunc.
Again why do we keep bringing this up? There is no way Naim will release a new CDP. Had they wanted to, they would have already done so. This is like beating this to death. For better or worse, Naim is in the steaming camp. There are merits to CD as well as streaming. Just accept it will not happen from Naim.
Well yes same as everyone.
But i can clearly show you the difference, and you will easily hear it.
The difference is plan to hear when done right.
I wouldn’t bother listening to just 44.1 these day’s as it’s just not the same.
It doesn’t sounds wrong or bad, it just hasn’t got it compared.
I believe there was a fair amount of modifications being made to Naim’s specification so a lot more than just a rebadge.
I agree that it is highly doubtful that Naim will create a new CD Player, let alone a range of them; it’s not the direction they have decided to go in. However, if there is a group that would like one, why should they, even if they accept what you say, keep quiet?
If no one brought it up how would anyone know if there is even a glimmer of demand for such a device?
Anywho, if you don’t like the topic you could always just ignore it and well, say nothing.
People like to speculate , this is a discussion forum and this has been a talking point people obviously have liked discussing.
Are your sure… I think it’s more than capable for today. 48 kHz sample rate is common for more alignment with video rather than anything else.
If you over sample CD and hear a benefit, then that benefit is a consequence of the limitations of your DAC, not the content itself. §
44.1/16 can sound absolutely superb, real and vibrant, if you have a quality DAC and replay equipment.
§ one notable exception if you have a digital source recorded with high jitter, then oversampling on playback reduces the jitter noise power in the audio pass band.
Upsampling doesn’t make any sense to me – as I posted a little earlier, upsampling doesn’t (cannot) add any new info/Data…Whether this is a correct analogy to audio or not I don’t know, but if I’m working on a 8bit Photoshop file and convert it to 16Bit I’m not adding any new information to the file…
It wasn’t long ago, when Hi-Def Download Stores started being established online, I remember lots of suspicion and wariness re the actual ‘hi-def’ status of what was being purchased…were they really hi-def originals or merely 16Bit files that had been up-sampled to 24Bit etc…Histograms being pulled out all over the place on Hoffman etc to analyse the legitimacy of files and so….
So my wonder, flicking a switch on a DAC to upsample say an incoming 16bit feed – what is it actually ‘doing’…? I’m not doubting they may be a sonic difference of some kind, but is it not just perhaps something to do with noise or clocking or such (all things I know little about)…it certainly can’t be any more Bits or info in the file that have magically been generated….?
SC
A better (lower noise -higher output) power supply makes more of an “improvement” then most outboard dacs (including ones that upsample).Naim said this themselves -from their research early on
I’ve noticed that the difference between 44.1 and hi-res is really only a problem on cheap devices like Walkmans. On those, the difference is in your face and obvious. The better the DAC gets, the less obvious it gets. And this makes total sense. A higher sampling rate and bit depth gives the DAC less to do, not more. Faithfully reconstructing from a lower resolution media takes a lot more care and raw power I assume.
Certainly I know this to be true with video also. Older standard definition 480p content on a cheap device is really ropey and frankly horrible and anything hi res is laughably better. But on a really high end device, the gap between “crusty” 480p and 4K is suddenly a lot smaller.
I find it interesting that with so few, if any, similarities between reconstruction of video and audio that one point holds consistently true for both: the worse the processing, the bigger the gap between lower and higher resolutions media. The better the processor, the smaller the gap - and therefore, less reason to walk away from older content.
I never listen to a CD and think (gosh this is rubbish next to hi res). Given the same master, I tend to find greater difference in presentation between the transports feeding the DAC than I do between 44.1 and higher resolution media.
This seems a paradox to me – I would have thought/presumed the exact opposite to be true…The more Bits and info to unpack, the ‘processor’ has to work harder to analyse and convert…?
If I throw a 1080p video file at a Mac it won’t break a sweat, but give it 4K 60fps file it’s likely to get a bit hot under the collar – processor and ram dependent of course…
I’m sure there’s something specific re audio that I don’t understand or I’m totally illogical, but it doesn’t make sense to me on the surface…
SC
Well on 44.1/16 the DAC has to do a lot of interpolation to reconstruct an accurate audio signal. There’s enough data to work with but less than a hi res file so more inference is needed between samples and this generates more work for either the DAC as a chipset or any pre processing DSP that might be working on the stream. The more data you have, the less of that workload exists. Ignoring the differences in audio and video for a moment and just viewing it from a volume of data perspective, the distance to travel to get less data from starting point A to more data, destination B is proportional to how far apart A and B are.
Same with video. My cheap devices also don’t struggle with 480p whereas they do more work with 4K. But their 480p output is utterly dire. Unwatchable in the case of my Fire sticks. Conversely with higher end renderers, doing a good job of upconverting 480p and rendering smooth gradients and curves in 4K makes the CPU absolutely knuckle down. The amount of data it has to fill in is just massive. And it absolutely works harder on that than 4K for those capable devices.
In short, lesser devices do less work on lower resolution content, and it shows. Again, if you go to a high street electrics retailer, the audible difference between standard and hi resolution audio will never sound more obvious than when they demo that on lower end mass market devices.
There is some oversimplification of course. In audio you have oversampling and upscaling and they are absolutely not the same thing. In video you only have upscaling but there are four main ways of achieving this (5 now with true intelligent algorithms) and the end results are very far apart as are the workloads.
Your thoughts are correct. More data means more to do, and with FIR filtering the higher the sample rate, the less effective a fixed kernel size reconstruction filter will be for a given number of taps.
However with higher sample rates and sample word sizes, the less precise a DAC needs to be … although a DAC that over samples also tends to equivalence of what a higher sample rate would so, and the help for the reconstruction filter.
Now in certain specific scenarios higher definitions may help, but for the most it is I suggest unnecessary.
It is interesting how some people love ‘a live concert’ on BBC Radio 3 on FM in the UK… that sample depth and rate is ISTR 30 kHz and 14 bits (companded to 10 bits) as used in the distribution network.
That makes me laugh 
So then a SACD is just making up for limitations of the dac.
As said, done right upsampling makes a big difference.
Plus you trying to say that the vivaldi dac, one of the best dac’s made can’t do 44.1, again that makes me laugh 
. If my dac cannot do it then, well every naim dac certainly can’t.
Upsampling doesn’t add anything to the music, it doesn’t alter the music.
But what it does do is give it far more space and time for that music to do it’s thing.
Its a bit like myself, i can see without glasses on ok, but put my glasses on and everything is better and clear.
As said its plain to hear on my system, but for me the advantage gets harder to hear once 96 is reached, as i can switch Upsampling off, or set it to many different levels.
Sure do feel free to laugh. If you are generally interested in consumer audio replay and digital sample rates, you might find the AES library a fascinating resource. This content comes from the industry and academics who shape these standards and products, and technologies we use for consuming audio but usefully is totally devoid of consumer marketing and based on facts and critically it is peer reviewed and presented.
SACD can provide a greater resolution than CD, but only if mastered to take advantage of it… and will unlikely to be noticeable otherwise.
The biggest determiner is how the mix master is mastered for distribution… and then physical replay chain.