Kevin Bresnahan

My late uncle had two bypass operations before he turned 45. His son decided it would be a good idea to get a calcium scan. His score was 750. They then followed up with a cardiac catheterization and they found several severe blockages. Within two weeks of getting his cardiac calcium score, he had a quadruple bypass. It was his story that got me to finally get one. Good thing I did. My results were pretty bad but not bad enough (yet) to require bypass surgery. Strangely enough, my older brother got a score of 0, which blows my mind. I think a lot of it has to do with high cholesterol. My cholesterol has been high for much of my adult life, even while taking statins.

I just wonder which one of us is the horse?

Billy Strayhorn - Cue For Saxophone (London). This used to be a tough CD to find but looking at discogs these days, maybe not so much any more.

I get you are worried about noise in your signal path. That is a valid concern in most audio designs. However, I don't think it's as much of a concern in this particular path as in others closer to your ear. The signal amplification after the internal DAC chip in your DAC box is simply to amplify or attenuate that analog signal to match the required DAC box's line level output voltage, which is typically .3-.4 Volts. If your line level output voltage is much higher than that, you could overload your preamp input and end up with very noisy playback. It's not like it's driving your speakers. From what I've Googled, there's not much of a circuit needed to convert the DAC chip's output signal to a line level output. It looks like it's usually done a simple op amp. There doesn't appear to be a lot of circuit design variations to clean this up. I suppose someone could use a shitty opamp but that would be pretty stupid on their part. To be honest, I would hope that any circuit designer would make sure that the signal coming out of their box, be it a CD player or DAC, had very low noise or they wouldn't be a circuit designer for very long. I personally wouldn't worry too much about it either, as long as you stick with reputable companies and not some cheapie manufacturer like Crosley. Then again, many of my "work friends" over the years have been circuit designers. Sure, I worked with some lazy designers but even they had to make the circuit work as expected or no one would buy the resulting product. I have had to get down into the guts of a lot of these circuits to help these designers debug their circuits when they didn't work as expected. Every single one of them knew their circuits inside and out. When I graduated from college, I tried getting a job in the audio industry but no one was hiring back then. Instead, I stuck with RF products (50 MHz-100 GHz signals) so I worked a little higher in frequency than audio. I bet I've debugged thousands of RF circuits at this point in my life. Sometimes I miss doing that, but then I remember all the office politics and the shitty commutes and I thank my brother Dan again for making me stuff so much money into my 401K so that I could retire early.

One thing I will agree with Lon about here is that some of the cheaper CD players have lousy transports, which is one reason to look at a set-up like his. I believe that this is due to the manufacturers moving towards cheaper parts or even buying a transport "off the shelf" from a major supplier. A lot of CD players were using PC transports but that market has basically evaporated, as almost all internal optical drives these days are "laptop" or slimline CD drives.

I am in pretty good shape. Exercise alone will not keep the cardiologist away. It will help, but it is not the only thing you have to worry about If you want to check your cardiac health, ask your PCP to have your cardiac calcium score measured. Even if your health insurance won't cover it, it is not very expensive. I think it's around $140. It's a CT of your heart. A score of zero means you have no blockages in your heart. My score was far from 0. I'd recommend any guy over the age of 55 reading this to get this done, if only to establish a baseline. It's a cheap and easy thing to do but it can identify a serious problem. Another it sucks getting old story... We have a bird trying to build a nest above our back awning. We bought some plastic spike strips to mount up there. I get out the ladder and attach the spike strips. Now, I don't use a ladder much, so it involved muscles that I don't use often. The next day (yesterday), my stomach feels like someone kicked me.

You say you're "not talking about the digital signal", but this discussion is around an external DAC. A DAC is only involved in the digital stream. What happens after the digital is converted to analog happens outside the DAC, no matter if it's internal or external. I try to stick to one topic but you keep expanding it. Look Lon, I don't want to argue what you hear. You hear what you hear. I hear what I hear. My statements here are for others, as you constantly discount my scientific explanations for what is happening in digital audio systems. I stick to the science because I know it is the best predictor of what will happen to a signal. Do I have to apologize for being an electrical engineer who worked in the semiconductor industry for over 40 years, mostly as a test engineer? I have lived with the science of electrical signals for a very long time. I have used this knowledge to guarantee that many of the components in a lot of the equipment used in many of our audio systems work as they were designed to work. The next time someone pops open their gear, see how parts say ADI or Analog Devices on them. Truth be told, if it wasn't for science, we'd all still be listening to wind-up Victrolas. It's true that people can ignore science, but I feel that is a mistake. Too many businesses out there take advantage of people who ignore science, advocating or selling solutions to problems that don't exist. This is happening everywhere, not just in the world of audio. It's pervasive in our society. It's particularly bad in the area of healthcare these days, but that veers too close to politics, so I won't go down that rabbit hole. Back to the topic... I believe a CD player is fine to use. A transport and DAC is fine to use as well. I would recommend a Marantz CD player. I haven't owned a Denon CD/SACD player but Denon & Marantz are the same company and I have owned a Marantz CD/SACD player. It should sound very good. As for getting into the CD vs SACD debate... SACDs should be able to present the audio better than CDs. But in practice, it all comes down to the mastering. If an SACD is created with a poorly mastered analog source, the SACD will re-create that lousy audio perfectly. I have some incredible-sounding SACDs and some poor-sounding ones. But as we've established already, I hear what I hear.

I get what you're saying about power supplies & noise but again, a regular CD player would have to be terribly designed and manufactured for that to slip into a commercial product. I've yet to hear one with an audible (noisy) analog output. But if we're talking about frequency response... to change the frequency response of an analog waveform coming out of a DAC, millions of 1's & 0's would have to change, not just a few hundred. Digital audio just doesn't work that way. Every 22 picoseconds, the audio is sampled and a 16 bit word is created for that small slice of audio. Just this one 16 bit word would have to radically change for the audio output frequency to change. To have a whole passage of music have altered frequency response, every single 16 bit word, one after the other, would have to change in the exact same way to have the analog output to have a shifted frequency response.

As I've told many people when I'm asked about stuff like this, try both side by side and see for yourself. I'd never stop someone from buying anything they like. We're all different. Personally, I have heard several transport/DAC set-ups recently. One had a very expensive DAC. That system had an NAD CD player in the system as well. We went back & forth between the two playback systems and we just couldn't hear any differences. No change in the highs or lows and certainly no change in the noise levels. To our ears, there was no difference. As I've said before, this is a good thing to me, because it saves me a bunch of money by not forcing me to upgrade. To be honest, back in the days when my hearing was much better, I sampled a lot of CD players, probably close to a hundred players, and I was never able to tell much difference between any of them. There were stereo shops where I would compare CD player to CD player to CD player with the same CD with no discernible differences. I expected this because digital audio kinda works that way. The 1's and 0's get converted to analog and unless the player has a really shitty DAC, and I've yet to hear one that does, it will sound pretty much the same. The identical set of 1's and 0's simply cannot change the frequency response through a different DAC. Error correction can be improved, but error correction doesn't mess with the audio frequencies. Poor error correction just adds noise.

If I were in the market for a straight-up player, I would likely look at Marantz or NAD like Lon recommended earlier. I wish Oppo Digital didn't exit the business. Their players were great bang-for-the-buck. I personally think a transport and an external DAC is a solution looking for a problem. Most of the claims of improvement using this type of set-up revolve around jitter, which is proven to be 1) not a problem with almost any CD player made and 2) not audible even if it is really really bad.

I started working out regularly when I retired. I hate running, especially in the winter, as it just wrecks my knees and feet, so after trying a few out, I bought a Matrix A30 elliptical machine. I love it. I get on it 45-60 minutes a day. No knee or foot pain, which is great. If you want a low-impact workout, I'd recommend an elliptical.

Zenato makes some great wines. My favorite one is the one they make after they make their Amarone. After the press the dried grapes to make their Amarone, they press regular Valpolicella grapes on the skins from the Amarone grapes. They call it a "Ripassa" and it has that Amarone flavor profile at about 1/3 of the price. I call it "baby Amarone". https://buywinesonline.com/collections/zenato/products/zenato-ripassa-valpolicella-superiore-2021-750-ml

I used to get a back issue every time I shoveled snow. During one of my chiropractor visits to treat the problem, he recommended a back brace/belt - which he just happened to sell. I tried it and it does minimize the issue quite a bit. The other way to minimize back issues while shoveling is to avoid twisting. Pushing straight ahead is best. This is the type of back brace I've used for over a decade: https://www.coreproducts.com/products/corfit-back-support-belt Make sure to get one with the stiff support ribs in the back. BTW - regarding chiropractors - I have recommended my chiropractor to a lot of friends and coworkers. Two coworkers with serious back and hip issues were very skeptical. I told them to just try him for 3 visits. Both of them finally took my advice and gave him a try. After those 3 sessions, they were both back to normal. They thanked me over and over again for the recommendation and I'm sure they are still patients of Dr. Stephen Shields at Hampstead Chiropractic in NH. The important thing about Dr Shields is that he takes X-rays before doing anything, which is important. If your back issues are disc-related, like a herniated disc, and someone starts adjusting your spine, they could do some serious damage. I knew a guy who almost got crippled from that.

Back problems are the worst. I get a twinge every now & then. I have a chiropractor that does wonders when it gets really bad. A good chiropractor can do wonders. A bad one can make it worse.

I'm the same age and like you, I don't "feel" old... in my head. I was lucky to be able to retire at 61. The company where I spent the last 21 years of my career, Analog Devices, "made me an offer I couldn't refuse" so I took it.