Thoughts on Musical Fidelity A3?

[Prefuse]

I am able to buy this player used for $600.00. Is this a decent price? How is the sound quality? Any other suggested players for around $600.00 used/new? Thanks.

[FLZapped]

I am able to buy this player used for $600.00. Is this a decent price? How is the sound quality? Any other suggested players for around $600.00 used/new? Thanks.

Gee, I dunno, is $600 the breakpoint that satisfies your "ID" - in other words, where you actually believe you have purchased a superior product????

-Bruce

[Mash]

Musical Fidelity A2 player 6 years ago NEW for $500, and a LOT of water has gone under the CD/DVD player bridge since then.

I bought a Toshiba DVD/CD player with a 24/192 audio chip at Sam's for $70 more than a year ago, and it gives a smashing playback of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Columbia CK 64935. This is a 20 bit remastering.

So I would suggest that there is no compelling reason to spend $600 on a used Musical Fidelity A3 player. I would even suggest that there is no compelling reason to spend $600 on any CD player.

[Prefuse]

Gee, I dunno, is $600 the breakpoint that satisfies your "ID" - in other words, where you actually believe you have purchased a superior product????

-Bruce

Not exactly, but I do believe that a $200.00 CDP can sound different and worse then a $1200.00 player. At least this is what my ears, not my "ID," tell me. By $600.00, I meant this to be my budget limit.

[FLZapped]

Not exactly, but I do believe that a $200.00 CDP can sound different and worse then a $1200.00 player. At least this is what my ears, not my "ID," tell me. By $600.00, I meant this to be my budget limit.

I suppose you can also find the converse to be true. There have been folks on here rave about the Cambridge(I think) CD player.....if the old archives are still availble a search would have yilded the results.

-Bruce

[Mash]

I remember various Sterteophile CD player reviews where the listening part of any review was usually favorable in direct proportion to the unit's quoted selling price, and the apparent prestiege of the manufacturer's name seemed to correlate to quoted selling price as well. But the test results section never documented relative performance that correlated very well with the various units' quoted selling prices. Some expensive units had dither, for example, that was obviously higher across the spectrum than had been measured for some "good value for the money" units.

As technology reduces CD player variation (i'e' distortion, non-linear response, etc.) toward zero, all CD chipsets and all CD players will approach an identical performance. [After all, there can be only one "perfect performance".] Therefore, all CD players will ultimately be interchangable commodities, and then almost everyone will buy the least expensive.

One used to buy an expensive watch to have an accurate timepiece, but the advent of quartz watches has finally reduced accurate timepieces to an inexpensive commodity, so now people buy expensive watches not for accurate timekeeping but for prestiege, jewelry, or nostalgia.