Quote Originally Posted by hertz
Hi Mtrycraft,
What if somebody has good speakers, rooms and good recordings? Then, do you think a good cd player will make a difference ?
I have an audiophile friend who has an almost perfect room, musical fidility power and pre amps and dynaudio contour floor standing speakers.He has further tweaked his room with bass traps.Once you turn the music on, I almost get an errie feeling because of the realism in the reproduced sound. He has roksan and marantz cd players and a harman kardon dvd player.We have tried out all these in his music system.In fact I have checked out my nad cd player in his system.It is as clear as night and day that all of them sound different.Some of them differ slightly but some others are quite different.In fact I can clearly make out differences in his system if I change cables also.
But these things are not so apparant with my system which is not so high end and the room is less that perfect.I guess the bottom line is that, if you have a transparent system and a good room, all these differences suddenly becomes clear to you.

Your hearing is still the limiting factor. It has limits. Psychoacoustic reasearch over the past number of deacdes has shown that you will hear small volume differences as better sound. And, volume differences you need to differentiate varies with overall volume.
With louder sound you need smaller differences to detect but there is a limit what you can detect. Low levels may need as much as 3dB change to detect. Frequency response of the ear is also limited and need higher levels and higher differences at either end of the spectrum.

I seriously doubt that a well designed CD/DVD player is audibly different. One only needs to check the frequency response specs for that.

What will affect your perception is the good old bias issues in a sighted comparison

In a DBt you also need to set it up technically so the levels in each player is the exact same, to a very close tolerance for which you need instruments, not by ear.

Cables, unless they are not even closely comparable is a no brainer. Nothing there, especially if the receiver is doing the digital processing for all the players.

So, in the end, you need to do a DBT to be sure