Repair or Replace - Marantz CD63se


I have a Marantz CD63se that I paid $353 in 1996. Bad laser assembly, estimated at $210 to repair. I have no idea how CD players have evolved (or devolved)in the last 15 years or what $350 in the new/used market can get me today. Help! Should I repair this or buy new/used, like the CD6004?
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Showing 3 responses by johnnyb53


11-02-12: Theo
I agree, move on. My experience is, if you replaced the laser something else will fail shortly after. It is 12 yrs old, it owes you nothing.

Umm, that's 16 years, more than half the distance back to the introduction of the CD in 1982.

At this point you may be better off ripping all your music (with a lossless codec) to a PC or Mac, and then get an inexpensive 3rd party music control software such as JRMC, Audirvana, or Songbird to improve the sound on playback.

I'm getting excellent sound with my MacBook Pro plus portable 500 GB hard drive to hold the music plus Audirvana Plus working as a plug-in to optimize the computer for sound while using iTunes as the user interface. You can further improve the sound with an asynchronous USB DAC such as the Musical Fidelity V-DAC MkII. This will sound worlds better than your 1996 CD player.

11-03-12: Rar1
Johnny ... And then what do you do when the hard drive crashes and dies?

I see you're a Mac guy and so am I. I've had our household wireless network connected to an Apple Time Machine for nearly 4 years, so we have intermittent backups several times a day. If I were to lose my internal drive or a cluster of files, I could retrieve them.

Second, most of my iTunes music is ALAC rips from my personal CD collection, and I still have the CDs,

Third, portable USB drives are CHEEP and ruggedized for portable use. You can get 1TB portable drives from Amazon for under $100. That's enough space to hold 2800 lossless CD albums. For $89 buy two and use one as backup.

The other part of this conversation is that single-play CD players strike me as a rather primitive solution. For $50 I installed Audirvana Plus on my MacBook, enabling me to buffer music files in RAM, adjust upsampling multiples, and turn off processes that might detract from sound quality. Then there's the convenience of having the whole music library at your fingertips and the ability to organize and set up ad hoc playlists at will.

Sonically my MacBook with Audirvana beats my CD players, and I can now play 24/06 and 24/88.2 files through iTunes, whjch totally beats the pants off redbook files.

11-03-12: Zd542

Johnnyb,

...
In no way am I suggesting that you are not getting good sound or challenging you, in any way. I only ask, what happens to the signal when it gets converted to analog that allows you to get the good sound? Are you using a DAC or the analog output on a sound card? Possibly something else? Not everyone is getting the good results that you are with computer based audio. Any input that you can give can possibly save me, or someone else from making a mistake.

I'm glad you asked, because getting good computer sound has been a recent and revealing odyssey. There were two main things that turned my computer-based audio into something enjoyable and musically engaging. The first was installing Audirvana Plus and configuring it to upsample in multiples of two. Thus redbook-sourced ALAC files get upsampled to 88.2 Khz instead of 96. This smoothed out the treble a bit. Then I used Audirvana's buffering capability to reserve 5 GB of RAM to buffer music files to RAM before decoding. This *completely* eliminated the bleached, threadbare sound I was getting from streaming directly from a USB hard drive. Third, I set it up to turn off processes that would otherwise create background processes (e.g., backups) and interrupts (e.g., mail announcements). I got some nice AudioQuest Mini-5 cables (PSC+ copper) on closeout from MusicDirect to connect the computer to my line stage. And very significantly, I swapped out a Jolida opamp/tube hybrid line stage for a pure tube (with tube rectifier and ginormous transformer) PTP line stage. THIS was the final flourish, taking all those digital files and rendering them with a natural organic finesse we usually don't associate with digital anything.

So you might say my true tube line stage *is* my carefully constructed analog section. It works for me; I have hardly been able to abide digitally sourced music for years, but with this new setup I can turn a playlist on (Audirvana can work as an iTunes plug-in) and enjoy ALAC files for hours.