Hi,
The headphones have been hooked to the headphone out on the CA 840A amplifier. The comments that you put guys is something that is quite possible. I was surprised myself. I took several other CDPs that were laying around (Audiolab CD8000 and Denon DCD 1500) and there were also no differences in reproduction - maybe a little bit in case of Denon.
I used during this test also Warf EVO 30 (the result was the same as with headphones) but you might say (and I would agree) that these loudspeakers are also not good enough to register major differencies between the players. That is why I didn't mention it in my first post.
But if that is true about EVO 30 and not good enough headphone output of CA 840A, that means that differencies between CDPs in a price range until 1000 euro are very subtle and that we need very good system to be able to notice it. The question is then: why should we put a CDP under 1000 euro in a very good system ? Or to put it in another way: if you have a system where the components are between 1000 and 2000 euro, probably various CDPs are not going to make a big difference, if any at all.
But it is possible that there are some other experiences - I haven't compare all CDPs that exist and it is quite possible that there are some other that do make a difference. Naim CD 5i does. So, I am not making here any generalizations based on only one test case ...
