CD"S

My enjoyment of the hobby includes the tactile and the kinetic aspects. I like to touch the record and marvel at how it can produce wonderful music. I like placing the stylus in the groove and anticipating the music starting as the turntable spins. I like looking at the covers and reading the liner notes and I like how I can still faintly hear the music coming from the record grooves if I play the record with the amps turned off. To me, records, or vinyl as they are now referred to, are magical, mysterious and amazingly musical. I was fortunate enough to have a career in radio broadcasting where I got paid to play records until the early 1990's. I discovered records before I was 2 years old and 70 years later my love of them has only increased.
Your mileage may vary.

We're going a bit far afield. 

The OP asked for advice between going to a new CD disk player, perhaps the Yamaha, or to hard disk.

Here is our take on the subject, you have really two ways of looking at the issue.

Point One: The future is streaming It is abundently clear that Tidal or Qbouz or any other non compressed preferably high resolution or at least 16 bit 44k data stream can sound as good or better than an optical disc especially when played on a good dac with a great server.

Point Two: You can easily store via ripping your CD library, this ensures that you have a visual catalog of all of the artists you like, and also can provide for CD’s that are from abstract artists as well as providing titles which may not be available on a streaming service.

Point Three: You gain conveninece, no more getting up to change discs, you can make playlists, no more skipped discs, or skipping or failing lasers, no more stuck trays, continuous background music for partys and events.

Point Four: You gain storage space no more racks of CD’s cluttering up the place.

Point Five: With Roon you can find new artists that the service will recommend to you that are similar to artists you like.

Point Six: With a streaming service you have instant access to both new music, new artists, and other albums from your favorite artists that you don’t already own.

Point Seven: On most servers you have access to internet radio which has some marvelous internet radio stations such as Radio Paradise, Jazz Adore, and many others, all without the noise and drop outs of terreterial radiio.

Point Eight: Roon is a gateway to control and access music via Apple devices, Chromecast, streaming loudspeakers from Naim, NAD, Sonos and many others so you can have one seemless interface and have music controlled and accessable throught your home which can be a great way to encourage a family to listen to and explore great music.


One of the biggest hurdles for the neophyite is ripping, hence we recommend the Innous line of servers which start at $1,200.00.
The Innous is super easy to use, you insert a disc in the slot and boom six-eight mins later your disc pops out and you have added the disc to your library.

So in our opinion there really is no comparison of the two worlds, with the streaming world you can still have your cake and eat it too.

Currently we have about 12TB of music on our server plus the streaming services and although we have had some of the world’s absolute best CD players in the shop, the Esoteric K03, K01X, the T+A PDP 3000HV and others, once you adopt the world of having a ripped cd libray plus a great server, you will probably never want to spin an optical disc again.

For the guys that are using a laptop or a PC connected to a dac there is a world of improved sound quality going to a good server, a PC is not designed to pass a noise free data stream to a dac, the resulting garbarge is one reason why a lot of guys are not prefering the sound of the server over the optical disc, you have to get a good server and usb or ethernet cable.

We would recommend you look at a good dac Mytek Brooklyn Bridge, or an Ifi DSD Pro or a Lumin D2 along with an Innous Zen Mini and for a very similar price to the disc player you can get a product that will span both the past as well as the future.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Innous, Lumin, Mytek, Ifi dealers

Pioneer makes a Universal Player for around $1K that is supposed to sound great.  My recommendation would actually be to get a transport for around $500 and spend the rest on a great DAC.  If you want to dip your toe in the streaming waters at some point then you will already have a DAC.