Fascinating historic read about CD

[Al M.]

Recently I read again J. Gordon Holt's fascinating assessment of the first CD player that came across the listening floor at Stereophile, the Sony CDP-101, published in January 1983:

http://www.stereophile.com/cdplayers/193/index.html

His comments are overwhelmingly positive, such as:

Through the high-level inputs of the Conrad-Johnson PV-3 preamplifier (reviewed elsewhere in this issue), the sound was so opulently gorgeous it almost defied belief! It was a total incarnation of the perfectionist's wildest dreams: rich, velvety, airy, awesome, liquid, yet incredibly detailed. There were none of the analog disc's problems. No marginal mistracking, no subtle VTA-error distortions, no disc-resonance smearing, no feedback-induced low-end boom or mud, no ticks or pops or pressing grumbles even at the highest listening levels. And there was no analog-tape flutter or modulation noise or transient-rounding or print-through or hiss.

He concludes with:

But even if CDs don't get any better, there is no doubt in my mind that this development will ultimately be seen as the best news serious music listeners have had since the advent of the LP.

And Larry Archibald comments:

In line with JGH's observations, I'd like to mention that it was absolutely thrilling to to hear ordinary recordings, that is, the material that Philips, DG, etc., routinely provide, reproduced with a clarity, force, and beauty that one almost never hears from their discs.

In his follow-up review in August of 1983,

http://www.stereophile.com/content/sony-cdp-101-compact-disc-player-follow-review

J. Gordon Holt (JGH) comments:

In fact, on the basis of that Decca disc alone, I am now fairly confident about giving the Sony player a clean bill of health, and declaring it the best thing that has happened to music in the home since The Coming of Stereo.

In "letters",

http://www.stereophile.com/content/sony-cdp-101-compact-disc-player-letters

he says:

We find it truly fascinating that digital sound has no middle ground. Those who like it believe, on the basis of their hearing experience, that it is the most accurate recording medium ever contrived. Those who don't are hysterical in their condemnation of it, using such words as "horrible," "grotesque," "filthy", and of course "ugly" to describe what they don't like about it. (Whatever happened to "Not very good"?)

The impassioned intemperance of these criticisms should be a tip-off to any neutral observer that there is more involved here than the considered criticism of a new recording medium.

The general tone is in fact surprisingly like that with which Fundamental Creationists attack Godless Commie evolutionism. It is the rage of frustration, born of a completely unsupportable gut feeling that some thing ought to be, and made even more infuriating by the evidence that other people don't seem to think it is.

So far we haven't received one letter which says, "I played one of my favorite analog records, taped the preamp output on a digital recorder, and compared the two. The digital tape ruined the music and made it ugly." Stereophile readers will remember that that's exactly what we did when testing both the Sony PCM-1 and PCM Fl but we found the digital sound slightly cleaner even than the original, presumably because the high-frequency mistracking from the disc was not preserved on the digital tape. Of course there are a lot of just awful-sounding digital sources, most of them analog discs of digital records. We don't like them any more than anybody else.

In "JGH Responds to Doug Sax",

http://www.stereophile.com/content/sony-cdp-101-compact-disc-player-jgh-responds-doug-sax

we read from JGH:

I have never before done this, but I am going to recommend a product to all of our readers who can afford it. I am referring to the Compact Disc player.

One of the few things that our entire staff has ever agreed about is that the sound obtainable from digital audio can be better than the best that is available from analog sources, particularly home analog sources. (Larry Archibald is undecided about this; J. Gordon Holt, Dick Olsher, and Bill Sommerwerck are sure.)

In later comments that year (all reading material is connected with web links) JGH does raise some reservations but remains overall a clear defender of the CD medium.

***

People may ask themselves, how could not just JGH but the entire staff at Stereophile get it so wrong? Well, did they?

Certainly, at first they may not have noticed all the shortcomings of early CD replay, and it is fascinating that for example, as JGH reports, Dick Olsher also was sure that the sound from CD can be better than the best analog sources. A few years later when I started to read Stereophile (in 1990; the year when I became an audiophile) this was clearly not the case anymore.

Indeed, also JGH himself backed off his first enthusiastic assertions later. Look for example at his review of the Meridian MCD and MCD Pro players, published in February 1985, two years after his first rave reviews of the CD medium:

http://www.stereophile.com/cdplayers/285meridian

We read:

I don't know which of these elements contribute to the MCD'S sound, but Meridian must be doing something right, because the MCD has established a new standard for CD audio quality. The rather dry, more or less grainy quality that has previously characterized all CD reproduction is gone! For the first time, the sound of the best CDs (Telarcs, RealTimes and Sheffields) is truly liquid and transparent, with an effortlessness that I have not previously heard except from the better analog sources.

Contrast this with his assertion two years earlier about the Sony player:
The sound was so opulently gorgeous it almost defied belief! It was a total incarnation of the perfectionist's wildest dreams: rich, velvety, airy, awesome, liquid, yet incredibly detailed.

No word there about a "rather dry, more or less grainy quality of CD reproduction".

Also, later in the review he says:

The MCD has, as far as I'm concerned, elevated CD sound to the point where it is directly comparable with the best analog sound.

Now contrast this with his earlier assertion above, with the Sony player that was in hindsight clearly inferior to the Meridian under review (emphasis mine):

One of the few things that our entire staff has ever agreed about is that the sound obtainable from digital audio can be better than the best that is available from analog sources, particularly home analog sources.

 

[Al M.]

While the initial excitement of the Stereophile staff is understandable, also I could hear that not all was well with CD, even though I was relatively quick to embrace the medium once a sizable catalog of music became available and never looked back; I had started to dislike LPs already in the pre-digital days because of the clicks and pops that drove me crazy (I can enjoy other people's analog systems, but I could never have one of my own). First off, it was clear that not all CD players sounded the same, which went counter to "Perfect Sound Forever". Also, I quickly ditched my first CD player, the Cambridge CD3, which I had loved in many ways, when I discovered that imaging was not stable and that instruments changed position in the soundstage according to the pitches they were playing and as a function of interaction with other instruments (I suppose this was a jitter problem; my second CD player was the below mentioned Meridian 208 which did not have this particular problem).

Yet clearly I was already influenced by the at the time (1990) emerging consensus among audiophiles that CD was in many ways still inferior to analog, a consensus that had not yet emerged in full bloom when those first reports about CD came out in Stereophile in 1983 (while obviously there had been detractors from the start, see also JGH's comments above).


My own take on all this:

1.
Certainly, at first the staff at Stereophile may have overshot in their enthusiasm since they may not have noticed all the shortcomings of early CD replay, but was everything really that good with analog playback at the time, in 1983?

As far as I understand, real high-end analog was just starting to come of age in the 1980s, and this would, as just one example, explain JGHs assertion about bass performance of the Sony CD player, which now probably is handily outperformed in that area by any great modern high-end turntable:

Musical bass was tighter, cleaner and deeper than I have ever before heard from any recording.

Also, somewhat later, in 1990, one of the better turntables of that era, the Linn LP12, was inferior to the cheaper Meridian 208 in reproduction of detail (in that respect this CD player set new standards at the time, at least at a less than stratospheric price), while by a wide margin this turntable beat the Meridian CD player in fullness and power of tone, size of soundstage and rhythm & timing. These days of course, when I listen to my friend's Nottingham turntable with Benz cartridge, I hear enormous refinement of detail that in turn clearly exceeds the resolution of the older Meridian 208 yet is closely rivaled by my current Berkeley DAC on CD playback, even though in some (not all) ways the much more expensive turntable still wins.

And regular non-audiophile average LP playback in the 1980s? Now that was on a much inferior level still, and the sudden tremendous gain in musical clarity for most listeners by CD made the general public instant converts -- I remember my own sense of eye-popping amazement when I first heard CD (in 1986?); I hadn't been an audiophile yet back then. So of course CD was a smashing success. I have hardly ever (with less than a handful exceptions) heard anything but great praise from average listeners for CD once it came out, and they never looked back. Practically everyone, except audiophiles in their own little world, was ecstatic about CD sound and entirely satisfied; shortcomings elsewhere in the average playback system covered up CD's weaknesses (1). Given that fact I knew from the start that SACD would be a flop and destined to fail since for the average listener it would not provide significant enough gains. Of course, there are still audiophiles who would deny that SACD was a flop, but by any ordinary commercial measure, and assessed in a manner unbiased by emotional attachment to the medium, SACD indeed was a failure -- it never gained mass appeal as would have been necessary to justify the enormous development costs.

2.
The analog vs. digital debate among audiophiles was carried out in the wrong ways. It should never have been such a debate, but rather a debate of analog vs. digital vs. live music. For example, since the debate was just about preferences for either medium rather than carried out with unamplified live music as the arbiter as it should have been, there has been unnecessary confusion and contention about the issue of 'hardness' of sound, as I outline in detail in post #17 on this thread page:

http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...ducing-digital-edge-Banished-completely/page2

I would have to say that on both sides of the debate people were only partially right. I wish that everyone here would concede that as well, but knowing human nature I am fully aware that this is probably too much hoped for.

3.
I am convinced that, if audiophiles would have been introduced to CD with something like the phenomenal, highly resolved and refined, involving and non-fatiguing kind of sound that I have now with the Simaudio Transport/Berkeley DAC combo in my system (and my fantastic CD playback is not even current state-of-the-art!), the analog vs. digital debate would never have developed the way it did, and CD would have instantly and permanently converted almost every audiophile on the planet in the early era 1983-1990, just as it converted practically every average listener back then. Yet of course, with the actual reality of CD playback then, the vigorous analog vs. digital debate was necessary in the first place to further CD development so that audiophiles like you and me could arrive at the sound that we now do have three decades later . . .

But to say that even now there is still something fundamentally wrong or problematic with even high-level CD playback is only understandable in light of early bad experiences and the ensuing endless, impassioned and contentious debate among audiophiles that have primed them, have hardened prejudices and have biased perceptions over several decades (2) (that is not to claim that hi-res may not be better still). It is also only understandable in light of the fact that just like CD playback has jumped light years ahead from where it was in the beginning, analog playback has made great progress since 1983 as well, as also has been repeatedly asserted by diverse high-end magazines over the years (and in the process analog has caught up with some of CD's core strengths). While this persistent attitude towards CD may be understandable in light of these things, it is, in 2014, not grounded anymore in sonic fact. Indeed, a number of previous die-hard analog fans have been coming around to embrace CD in recent years, as also witnessed on this forum.

And many reviewers (some of whom I actually believe) claim that even with CD reproduction we are still constantly exploring new boundaries with new reference products. So CD hasn't even reached its ceiling yet.

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(1) for example, I am still amazed at how relatively natural and so much better than the turntable the 1988 Philips CD player sounds in my father's system. But then, his modest average-quality hi-fi system is just not very transparent. In a transparent system like mine the weaknesses of this CD player would quickly become apparent and grossly irritating. None of that you hear in my father's system where in fact CD sounds rather pleasing. Similarly, I could never hear anything wrong with CD in my non-audiophile friends' modest systems (they were all ecstatic about the new medium) until I bought my first high-end system with CD player. All this comfortably explains to me why over the years average listeners could only scratch their heads whenever audiophiles were hell-fire preaching about the 'vices of CD'.

(2) It also depends on music preferences. Many pop CDs still sound lousy on any system because of loudness wars and other issues, whereas classical CDs to which I listen the most sound on average so much better -- and a lot of them sound great. But those differences have nothing to do with the quality of the CD medium per se.