New Toy - Marantz cd6004

bthogan

EndersShadow wrote: »

The problem is I dont think you can use higher than 320 bps on any iDevices. At that low of a bitrate I would think it would be hard to hear any differences between two USB cords....

Clipdat: In looking at your player it isnt really setup to playback high fidelity files via USB or your iDevice so I dont know how much use the nicer USB cable will have for you in regards to making it sound better as it appears your source files via USB are going to be limited.

Clipdat wrote: »

Enders: Yeah 320kbps mp3 and then the Apple Lossless is the highest it accepts as far as I can tell. I do think a properly encoded 320kbps mp3 can sound good though. Maybe not "HI-FI" in the true sense of the word, but in ABX tests, very few people can tell the difference between a 320 and a FLAC.

Kind of curious about this...the player's manual only cites 3 formats (mp3, WMA, AAC) as playable via USB, but I have no problem playing ALAC, and other folks say it plays WAV as well, even though the manual says that the above 3 are the only supported types. I can't find any specification that indicates that the player, rather than inputted file format, is limited by bitrate, and I'd always thought that bitrate is more or less irrelevant to playback devices and lossless formats.

Also, I think I can hear a difference between mp3s and ALAC files when I play them through the CD6004. Am I kidding myself (a distinct possibility)? Does the player have a bitrate limitation? Are iDevices limited by bitrate, even when they're playing (or otherwise outputting) lossless files? I know they're limited by their DAC, but I bought this player to get around that.

Sorry, don't mean to side-track...this might be worth a separate thread...

Clipdat

Great post - I will give it a try tonight with .wav files from both a USB stick and the iPad. Perhaps it "unofficially" supports ALAC and WAV but they weren't able to say so in the manual. Maybe trying to appease Apple lawyers? Not sure.

Not sure about the ability to display bitrate info on the cd6004. As far as I know iOS based devices are capable of playing 320s and ALAC with no performance/bitrate limiting. I think the "bitrate limit" w/ Apple devices is more related to the crappy fidelity of most 99 cent iTunes song purchases.

Clipdat

Results!

Playback from USB stick: .WAV yes, .m4a (ALAC) NO (header error displayed on screen)
(Also tried FLAC for fun, wouldn't even recognize the file)

Playback from iPad: .WAV yes, .m4a (ALAC) yes

So, interestingly enough even though the official documentation says nothing about .WAV support, they play just fine and sound great! This is great news - I'll definitely be buying a 16gb USB stick and filling it with .WAVs (or ALAC!)

bthogan

I think I overreacted. I knew from experience that it would at least play ALAC; my fear was that I was listening to ALAC, but getting mp3-level sound quality...then I realized that the official documentation says it only plays AAC, .wma and .mp3; highest bitrate for these, as the manual says, is 320bps. I found out that it plays the other file formats when I did my pre-purchase research; I didn't realize that the documentation doesn't mention that. A little more research last night indicated that the player's read-rate is basically a non-issue if you're playing lossless files - you get whatever SQ benefits accrue to lossless over lossy (uh correcting for other components and etc.).

Marantz does itself a disservice by not advertising/documenting the player's ability to read lossless formats via USB. Do they just assume that we're all listening to mp3 or AAC on our ipods? Which, I guess, isn't an unreasonable assumption...Even compressed, lossless music files are big 'uns. I've got two big pods (160GB and 80GB) to hold my ALAC files.

Clipdat

Yeah, I don't think it could "down sample" a .wav or .m4a and then play it back at 320kbps on the fly, so I'm pretty sure the full audio quality is indeed being reproduced.

So, I guess the bottom line is that it does support lossless formats which is a cause for celebration as far as I'm concrned. But yeah you hit the nail on the head regarding the advertising/marketing aspect of this. Proudly flaunting that it supports .wav via it's USB port would surly stir up more interest for people who are looking for a hi-fi experience w/ their CDP but maybe aren't necessarily ready to jump into the world of a dedicated/stand alone DAC.

bthogan

Clipdat wrote: »

Also looking forward to logging some more hours on it this weekend and trying out the USB port. I actually bought a special Audioquest USB cable to use with it: http://www.audioquest.com/apple-series/forest
Planning on doing another cable comparison with it vs. the stock Apple cable!

I just picked up an Audioquest Carbon Ipod cable for this player...I was gonna give it some burn-in time before I gave my impressions, because it's said they need one, but the improvement was immediately noticeable, so I went and started a thread re: my first impressions. The short answer is, yes, a noticeable improvement out of the box.

cusco69

Hi sorry to bump in here. I am also using the 6004 and you will be surprised that it plays WAV formats. I am not sure if it can be fed directly via the computer but I am using the flashsticks for a while. Recently I have some weird problems, it occasionally skips to the next song half way thru the current song. And there is a big difference between lossless and mp3. You will not want to play mp3 once you hear the wav formats.