CDs were supposed to be finished by now – killed first by MP3s, then by streaming. And yet two of MGY’s suppliers keep building new CD players, so clearly a real reason survives the format’s obituary.
That reason has to do with what a CD actually guarantees. Introduced by Sony and Philips in 1982, the format stores audio as 16-bit, 44.1kHz PCM data with mandatory error correction (CIRC) built into every disc — a fixed technical floor, unaffected by network conditions, service compression, or a catalogue owner pulling a title. A CD you own keeps sounding exactly the same in ten years; a streamed file depends on someone else’s server staying online.
Reading that disc accurately is its own engineering problem. A laser and photodiode track a spiral groove a fraction of a micron wide while a servo motor holds the disc at constant linear velocity, adjusting rotation speed as the laser moves from the inside of the disc outward. Any wobble in that tracking becomes jitter in the digital output – the same timing error that matters at the DAC stage, just introduced earlier in the chain.
Gold Note builds this out as a full range, from the entry- level CD-5 up through the CD-5.2, CD-10, and the flagship CD-1000 MKIl, mirroring the tiers of its turntables and DACs. Cary Audio takes a different route with a single model, the DMC-600SE, which pairs a CD transport with its own onboard DAC stage rather than treating conversion as someone else’s problem.
Below, decide whether you want a transport that feeds an external DAC or an all-in-one player before comparing anything else.
A CD player reads digital audio data (16-bit/44.1kHz PCM) from an optical disc using a laser and servo mechanism, then either outputs it as a digital signal or converts it to analogue via a built-in DAC stage.
Not inherently. CD audio is uncompressed 16-bit/44.1kHz, a fixed technical floor that many streaming services now match or exceed at their highest quality tiers — though playback still depends on the player’s transport and conversion
quality.
Some models let you use their digital output with an external DAC, but check whether a specific model, like the Cary Audio DMC-600SE, is designed primarily as an all-in-one
player before assuming this flexibility.
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