I have long pooh-poohed the idea that CD players could sound different, but I had a chance this weekend to try a blind test; and slap my thigh, it's true, they do.

So I had two players, and everything else in the chain was identical. I was plugging a single TosLink cable into one player and then the other, using the same physical CDs, and external DACs and amps. The lucky lucky blind tester was my wife, and of course I was also listening, but not blind.

There was a distinct and noticeable difference between the players. I'm not saying one was better than the other, or getting all stereophile about <meaningless acoustic attribute of your choice>, but my wife got it right (that's player 1/that's player 2) 100% of the time.

My point (eventually, thank you for sticking with it), is why ? A CD player reads 1's and 0's off a disk and pipes them down a fibre optic line at a fixed rate. It's the DACs, amps, and speakers that introduce the tone of the sound, surely ? If two players sound different, where is that difference coming from - presumably if they interpret the disk differently one of them would be generating errors in the DAC ?

Regards

Mark