I picked up a new receiver at the second-hand store, and it sounds better than the old one. It’s an old Panasonic, made in 2003 give or take. It doesn’t even have HDMI, but it does have digital inputs, and that’s really all I need. The past couple of years I bought maybe four or five CDs just because I had a special fondness for a particular album. I picked up some Rhonda Vincent and some Beck and some Aimee Mann. It’s weird. I have all of this stuff ripped to flac files and stored on my file server, and I can just fire up the HTPC and play anything I want, but I swear to you I’d rather put a disk in the CD player and push play and be done with it, one album at a time. When I was a kid in the 8th grade, I saved some birthday money and bought a Sharp DX-677 CD player. I had a mini-stereo system in my room, you know, those units that had a radio and a cassette deck and speakers all in one, and we just added the CD player to the mix with the RCA cable and I remember it so well. I’d pop in a disk and skip tracks and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I only believe I had the DX-677 because it most closely matches my memory of the player, as all of these in this particular line of players have subtle differences in the facia, but when I shopped for it on ebay, I noticed that the DX-200 and DX-R250 shared the same chassis as the DX-677, but it advertised a dual-DAC configuration, and so I figured it would be best to get one of those units. I ended up with the DX-R250.
I guess I would say that the sound of that player is so good, I’ve been having a lot of fun listening to it. As it turns out, the DX-200 and DX-R250 are in fact the most sophisticated of the players built into that chassis. They have Sanyo LC7881M DAC chips, whereas the others in this series have the Sanyo LC7880M chip. All the motors, the laser assembly, everything, is made in Japan. I’ve done some comparison listening between the Sharp player and the DAC in the Panasonic receiver, and I’ve even thrown in flac files from the HTPC and AAC encoded files from my phone, just to see if I could hear any differences, and I would swear to you that there’s something about the Sharp player. The music comes across as livilier and closer, somehow. The Panasonic sounds a bit warmer and smoother, by comparison. The sound out of the line output from the HTPC sounds thinner than the others. The differences are miniscule, as I can’t really tell the difference between CD audio and an AAC file. The differences I notice feel more like impressions than something I can point to.
A lot of the CDs I’ve been collecting come in damaged jewel boxes. Jewel boxes are something. I mean, they’re great in terms of presentation, but they don’t hold up to abuse really at all. One good drop and they crack. I did some shopping for replacement jewel boxes and then I thought I’d look for something a little better for long-term storage, and I ran into these polypropylene jewel boxes on Amazon. They are exactly like regular jewel boxes except the plastic material is different and it won’t crack. You can see through them, but they aren’t crystal clear like regular jewel boxes, but sort of milky or hazy. They hold the disks much more securely than the jewel boxes, and they are essentially future-proof, as in, they aren’t really going to wear out. You could throw these in a glove compartment and it would be perfectly okay.