I got a new H/K FL8385. Spdif or RCAs? (1 Viewer)

[JeremyErwin]

I picked up a Harman/Kardon FL8385 open box at circuit city, as I wanted a CD Player to replace my iBook (which was mechanically noisy) for such things.

I have a onkyo 502 reciever. I haven't bought (decent) interconnects yet, but I'm wondering whether getting good RCA cables will be worth it-- or whether I should just stick with S/PDIF.

 

[Jon_Welker]

It's probably about a wash between the DACs in the H/K and in the Onkyo. The H/K may sound a little better through RCA cables using it's DACs. There's only one way to find out though, and that's to do an A/B comparison.

 

[JeremyErwin]

Hmm. The analog stage was a little funky-- turned out to be a loose wire, so it's fixed now. The built in headphone amplifier is really quite nice, now that the right channel doesn't buzz.

 

[Steven Larson]

Jeremy, how do you like this cd player? Can I ask how much it was open box at CC?

Steve

 

[JeremyErwin]

I don't quite remember the price: $120 or so. I find it to be very finicky, and intolerant of dirty disks. Oh well, live and learn.

The remote isn't the best design, sort of a grey on grey design, with rows of identical buttons arranged in a almost haphazard manner.

 

[Steven Larson]

I am in the market for a new CD player, and I have an H/K receiver, so I thought it would be nice to have a cd player that matched it appearance wise. I am still trying to decide on the whole SACD, DVD-A, and HDCD thing.

 

[JeremyErwin]

HDCD is probably past its peak. I was in the market for a CD player because I don't have a television in the usual sense (astc tuner hooked up to a vga monitor), so I was quite wary of anything that would eventually require me to use a on screen menu... I use a mac to play my dvds.

 

[LanceJ]

Actually, HDCD seems to be on an increasing number of CDs, whether they are marked with the HDCD insignia or not. It's a relatively cheap way to increase sound quality (though there is disagreement on how much of an improvement).

From what I've read, Pacific Microsonics, HDCD's creator, builds very high quality professional analog-to-digital convertors (that the HDCD encoder is also part of), so even though your player might not have the DEcoder, usually the sound quality of the regular 44.1kHz/16bit data stream will still be very good. This is true with my own limited number of titles with HDCD: all my Cars CDs and almost all my 311 CDs use HDCD and sound very good (except for From Chaos & it was nothing to do with HDCD--to me it was just waaaay too overcompressed in the studio so it was nasty for me to listen to, almost as bad as the Beatles' 1 comp CD).

As far as dvd-audio & sacd's future: the formats themselves work as advertised but if they don't start putting out more popular titles..........

 

[gene c]

I have the previous years model 8380, also purchased as an open box from Circuit City for $99, and I think it's a great cd player. Matches very well with my H/K 520.

 

[Steven Larson]

Gene, have you noticed last year's model to be finicky as well? That is the one thing I have noticed from searching on the net is that people are having playability issues with this cd player.

 

[gene c]

No I haven't. So far it plays everything I've thrown at it and I use it quite alot. My H/K DVD 5, also an open box purchase, did have problems reading a few discs at first, but after I had the lens re-aligned it seems to be doing much better. But I don't use it all that often.

 

[FeisalK]

With SPDIF you will bypass the HDCD decoder in the CD player.

Unless you're thinking indecently priced cables it's not too big an investment to go both ways to see which you like better?