is there a current production 20 bit cd player ?

thank you tvad.

i just found another which i am going to investigate.

it is the granite audio 657 with tube output stage.

thanks again for not putting me in the troll club.

for thos who may be interested, my system consists of the following:

quad 63s, vtl deluxe 120 mono amps, a maple tree 66sn7 based preamp from Canada, an Audionote CD2 cd player.

my cable is a hodgepodge consisting of legenburg by capativa, dcca audio and sunny cable technology model 600 cable.

i am looking for a backup cd player to my audionote which a like, as it has age 5751 black plate.

yes i am a bit fussy, but i have a good idea of what i like.

again, thanks for not giving up on me and tell your budies to look at this post to see that i have a hopefully credible audio system.

oh yes, i forgot an important accessory, the EAT cool tube dampers for my 12 volt tubes. it's aluminum and looks like a heat sink and has teflon inserts. really works well. ican't remember the web site but if you do a google search, i think you can find it. iheard these tube dampers at the 2006 CES.

It's not current production, but an excellent 20-bit player was the Denon DCD-1650AR, released in 2001, MSRP $1,800. I've owned two and still have one. While it's no longer my reference player, it's a very fine one, very well made, built like the proverbial battleship, weight 26 pounds 4 ounces! You can pick up a used one at a very reasonable price. (It does have 8X oversampling.)

NAD C-521BEE is 20-bit machine also.

Can anyone tell me what a 20 bit D/A does when presented with 16 bit data?

With oversampling a 16 bit D/A can output discrete levels corresponding to a 20 Bit D/A. That must be what is going on.

In any D/A the least significant bit, and sometimes two, usually toggles randomly from a one to a zero. If you use a 20 or 24 bit D/A to process 16 bit data, at least you can be sure that bit 16 is out of the noise level. For example, you could zero out bits 17-24, and essentially have a noise free 16 bit converter.

Oversampling came into the audio field with the first Phillips CD players. They used a superior quality 14 bit D/A with 4X oversampling whereas Sony used a true 16 bit converter that was less than perfect. The Phillips players sounded much better than the Sonys, but the part that really makes me chuckle is that Phillips, who was in partnership with Sony on the CD development, never bothered to tell Sony what they were doing until it was too late for Sony to react.