Reply to "CD Players"

Matt,

the key phrase in your post is "casual listening". That's all we can do in a moving vehicle, especially a noisy moving vehicle like a Pantera. Auto sound is background music, like in an elevator! My fave is Dick Dale! King of the surf guitar.

Like it or not, the CD is on the way out as the dominant portable music source for automobiles. Some form of compressed music data system will be the next "thing". I just saw a 2 gig SD memory chip for a digital camera at Circuit City the other day. Solid state. Less than $100. That would store a lot of compressed music. Not much bigger than a postage stamp.

I'm not throwing away my CD library either. The realities of home listening & listening in the car are 2 different things however.

The most sensitive ear, trained for critical music listening, could not reliably distinguish the difference in music sources between a CD player & an RF iPod in a moving Pantera, listening to the music reproduced by the speakers found in the average Patera, located in the less than ideal locations Pantera owners are forced to make do with. This is assuming the test is an A/B double blind test conducted at listening levels matched to within +/- 0.2 db.

You obviously enjoy critical music listening. I'll bet you consider it a hobby and that your home sound system is at least 10 times the price of the average persons. To the average listener, compressed music data systems sound no different than non compressed sources.

Matt, I understand your concerns, I am a former associate of the Audio Engineering Society, owned a set of Quads before the kids came along.

your friend on the DTBB, George