Buying CostlyCD Players-worthy during these days?

I have hardly used my "expensive" CD player since I switched over to digital files. I would even consider selling it at 50% of cost - even though it has had about 50 hours of play. This is a CD player that doubles as a preamp, is a world-class DAC, regular and balanced outputs, offers optical and S/Pdif inputs as well as asynch USB input, is an SACD player too and has a transport that weighs 15 lbs. Yet in today's world it is a difficult sale. I think times have changed and there are many good alternatives if one is adventurous.

However, expensive CD players are the way for some - that is the beauty of audiophile equipment....there's something for everyone and not everyone is comfortable with digital or vinyl.

PM me if you are selling your Esoteric K-03 with expected price (50% ???). How old is the player and is it 230 volt construction?
As far as I know, it has perhaps the best transport on the planet.

Thanks.
murali
 
+1 to ripping of CDs and storing them in a hard disk and also on a backup if you could afford that :). I read Staxx's story a while back and it was unfortunate. A back-up always help. Even I had seen hard disk crashes and you CAN NOT afford to lose your music library. As Audio_Freek pointed out, the advantage of being able to search your music is also a very important advantage when you store then ripped. It also helps lazy bums like me to likes to play CDs back to back with out needing to "walk" to the player and change it. Though I love LPs, I don't want to play them on a lazy day as I have keep going to the player every 25-30 mins :D.

-John.
Losing of Music library was really troubled me as like loosing the Hair:eek:hyeah:
I kept most of my collections in External Harddrive and felt my collection are safe now, and my happiness ended very soon, as one of my friends he is the Hardware mechanic informed that the External HDD have very short life compared to Internal Hard drives and due to aging some times the EHDD would be not detected by the System One day. I lost my sleep that nightt because My EHDD is almost 3 years old that time. I was madly searching for Tapes which is used to back up Data from Mammoth servers too.

Then later got settled owning a Internal HDD ,Backing up the music,movies etc unplug it, kept in the Locker. As i understand USB nad EHDD age would be calculated on The Formats made and how many plug in they perform.

Just like like old Filament Bulbs which get fuse out when you keep on switch-on switch off.

Moreover this is the reason i was planning to get a Media Player with HDD Slot instead of having a port for EHDD connection.:yahoo:
 
Audio_Freek,

Is the same life span of 3-4 years applies to SSD EHDD as well?

-John.
I think SSD Doesn't come to this Radar, as the Booting of the Files matters here about the Life Span and SSD doesn't load the Disk driver and other Files if am not wrong.

So it would work longer than the EHDD .

Each time you plug the EHDD to the PC\some source to read the data, Booting occurs and which doesnt happen in SSD.

But i dont know, how you mange to Maintain the SSD as they are too costly comparing to EHDD
 
Staxxx responded to me with a reasonable offer to sell his Esoteric player. Unfortunately, in that little time gap, I had to back out.
I have been using a Ayre C-5xe player costing about US$5,000 bought around 7 years back and has been performing fine in my system. Recently, one of the forum members expressed his interest to buy it from me and as I have been upgrading all other equipment in the last 2-3 years, I considered selling it and buying a new one. However, suddenly the player developed some troubles and local technicians in my place were unable to locate the causes. It uses a Pioneer transport but the rest of the stuff is all Ayre design. As I do not wish to sell an equipment not in working condition, unless the buyer is willing to fix it himself, I immediately decided and sent it to Ayre who are more than willing to fix the whole thing and return to me in as good as new condition with only minimal costs. Their support is exemplary. Now once it comes back refurbished and upgraded to MP, I won't have to sell it anymore.
Otherwise, I had already lined up a good deal for a new Ayre C-5 as well as some used players of Esoteric, Luxman, Lindemann etc when Staxxx's offer came. The problem is that to me, the Ayre equipment falls excatly at the range I personally consider worth investing in a good source CDP with excellent performance. $5000 at an exchange rate of Rs40 was always my limit though it now sells for $6000 @Rs60. Even then, it is still cheaper than a used Esoteric or Accuphase. I don't feel my system can display those extra advantages I may have by moving to a $10000+ plus player. No doubt Esoteric-Teac makes the best transport, a major attraction of the old Wadia players who used to make the best CDP in our planet but I will not say the same thing about their DAC and other designs.
The important fact to bear in mind is the warranty associated. Even a company like Bryston who warranties their analog equipment for 20 years now limit the digital to 5 years. So I do not mind spending more money on amplifiers but will tread carefully with digital equipment. I may be wrong.

Once again, Staxxx, thank you and hope you find a buyer. I am only curious why you are unable to use such a good player extensively. In my case, I listen to the Ayre several hours whenever I can and have never enjoyed the same pleasure with the same music in some other players I had listened to.

Thank you and bye.
murali
 
Audio_Freek,

Is the same life span of 3-4 years applies to SSD EHDD as well?

-John.

The key difference is that a hard drive has a mechanical head (not unlike a turntable) that reads from a spinning disk. Due to the mechanical nature of the operation, mechanical degradation will happen naturally over the course of time (unless of course you don't use it at all). Meaning - it doesn't really matter if you are reading or writing to the disk.

In fact, it is a testament to man's engineering accomplishment that hard drives last so reliably when you consider that the platter spins at 5000-10000 rpm, and the head hovers millimeters above this fast spinning disk.

What *will* make a difference is if you keep your drive defragmented which will ensure that memory blocks are stored contiguously and means that your head doesn't have to go back and forth unnecessarily to read a single song.

Please note that different drives are engineered at different tolerances and with different reliability metrics. Just like audio components, you get what you pay for (largely). So a more expensive drive (especially the "enterprise class" drives) with a higher MTBF rating will generally be more reliable than a drive that is the cheapest you can buy (which is what people generally do).

While drives do fail, it is also very reasonable to have a well engineered drive last 8-10 years depending on usage, or even more.

It is also easy enough nowadays to have another external drive or even a pen drive purely as a backup.

SSDs are completely different though. They degrade over time because of write operations - i.e. when memory blocks get overwritten time and again. They also employ some "wear leveling" techniques to mitigate this to some extent. Since music libraries are more often read, and very seldom written and rewritten constantly, SSDs should theoretically be much better than regular hard drives. If you want the best of the best, go for SLC based SSDs. They will be more expensive of course. Or most SSDs from Intel should give you a better level of reliability than you would get from most other options. Intel just does a much better job of testing and validation.

However, note that good quality SSDs and good quality hard drives have both similar MTBF values - about 1.2 - 1.4 million hours - which is 100+ years. So you should actually be safe with both.

Examples:

http://ark.intel.com/products/56569/

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-WD5002ABYS-3-5-inch-Enterprise/dp/B001EMZPD0

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=20
 
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