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Do Laser disc players make good cd players??

jameselmer66

jameselmer66

Active Member
I have an opportunity to get a Pioneer CLD-S104 laser/CD player. I was just wondering what kind of single cd players these make sound quality wise. I have a Yamaha CDC-505 disc changer that uses 2 pairs of the Yamaha S-bit DAC's and sounds very good to me, especially being a changer. Does anyone know what kind of DAC's were used in the laser discs??
 
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This is actually a good topic for me. I found a mint laserdisc of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock (Cost me $2), but I have nothing to play it on.
 
i would say yes. they were made with great precision and when they were proliferating, the word was they were excellent for cd.

today, a sacd capable player is a good choice du to the upsampling.
 
hifitommy said:
i would say yes. they were made with great precision and when they were proliferating, the word was they were excellent for cd.

today, a sacd capable player is a good choice du to the upsampling.
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Good to know. I'll have to do a little research on high-quality laserdisc-players that still fly under the radar.
 
I have a Philips LD player that has a TDA-1541 DAC. So.... YES! It was purpose built for both.
 
Gang-Twanger said:
Good to know. I'll have to do a little research on high-quality laserdisc-players that still fly under the radar.
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The most sought-after are the Pioneer models. I bought a great Sony LDP (MDP-800) for a very reasonable price, and it sound great on both LDs and CDs
(the audio track of LDs are in PCM format and therefore not compressed, as in DVDs).
 
I'm no expert on the CD-playing specs, but I can tell you the CLD-S104 was a bottom-end Pioneer model with sub-par video quality. The signal-to-noise ratio spec on the video for this model tells you the picture quality was rather noisy as compared to the middle-end and high-end models from Pioneer. Not saying don't get it and use it -- just don't pay too much for it or expect too much.

I still have and use three middle-end players that, thank goodness, are in good working order to play my 1,000 or so big discs. Just a few years ago I acquired 500 or 600 LDs that, amazingly, duplicated few of the ones I already had and few of my larger DVD and fledgling Blu-ray collections.

I do play CDs on a Blu-ray player, but somehow I just never played many on my LD players over the years. I'm sure they're fine for it.
 
Go for a Pioneer Elite if you can find one. They aren't going to be cheap, but they're really nice players. Most of the standard line Pioneers weren't anything too special...and as video junkie points out, the CLD-S104 wasn't a high-end machine by any means.

I've also really liked the Sony players. I used an MDP-800 (?) for a while as a CD player and it sounded excellent through both its analog outputs and the TOSlink connection.
 
hifitommy said:
if i am not mistaken, the theta data drive is laser disc.
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I have a Theta Data II transport that plays pretty well. Had to replace the laser head though recently, if you get one you might have to do this kind of surgery depending on what type of laser head it has.
 
My Pioneer DVL-909 plays CD-LD and DVD at pretty high levels. Like the Elite models I would think that all of the later upper end Pioneer's would play CD's well.

I genreally do not use mine for CD's just because I want to limit the hours I put on the machine to LD's since a good LD player is hard to find where as a good CD player is a bit more common. Unless space is an issue I would still have a separate unit for CD use.
 
You'll never find a more overbuilt CD mechanism that the one in a laser disk player. It's designed to smoothly spin a 12" disk at 1800 RPM, so a CD is nothing. Also, the optics have to be much higher grade to be able to playback the analog video signal without excessive noise or distortion.
 
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