Question SACD and 24kt gold cds

[Trevor Lloyd]

I have no doubt this has been debated to death, but I have a few 24kt Gold cds and they sound fantastic I don’t mind admitting, probably the best listening experience given my setup. I see now that they have stopped making them and are just producing SACDs instead, given my Roksan Caspian CD player does not play SACD ( only if they are SACD/CD ) is there any point in searching out any more in the sense that I would be paying for a format I can‘t use ?

 

[Lawrence001]

Never heard of 24k Gold CDs are they better because of the material used, or are they better masters of the albums?

Do you mean should you buy SACDs if you haven't got an SACD player? Unless you think they'll go up in value what's the point?

 

[bigrod]

The gold CD’s tend to be master recordings.. a bit like XRCD which will play on std CD players
You can buy an SACD player second hand for not much money ..shop around and you can get them for less than £100
I have a Sony sacd/dvd player that I picked up for £20

 

[Warszawa]

It's the mastering you're enjoying, not the gold. That's just marketing sprinkles.

 

[Trevor Lloyd]

It's the mastering you're enjoying, not the gold. That's just marketing sprinkles.

Well I’m not so sure about that of all the remasters I have the 24kt Gold series sound the best I’m going to dig out and old CD player I think I have in the attic which plays SACD’s from memory and try them against the same cd in my Roksan ( which doesn’t play SACDs ) and see if I can tell the difference, certainly not interested in them going up in value just in their sound. Any recommendations for well remastered cd would be appreciated

 

[Pezski]

Most of the current 'audiophile' SACD releases are from Mobile Fidelity and are hybrid releases, so will play on standard CD players. As mentioned before, it's the quality of the mastering, making the most of the original production, that makes the difference.

 

[Lawrence001]

Well I’m not so sure about that of all the remasters I have the 24kt Gold series sound the best I’m going to dig out and old CD player I think I have in the attic which plays SACD’s from memory and try them against the same cd in my Roksan ( which doesn’t play SACDs ) and see if I can tell the difference, certainly not interested in them going up in value just in their sound. Any recommendations for well remastered cd would be appreciated

Still confused, you don't have any SACDs yet from what I understand, so all you're going to be testing is if the same CD sounds better from one CD player (that can play SACDs) to another (that can't). So you're testing which machine sounds better on CD playback? How could that help you decide whether to buy SACDs?

 

[MVJ]

I think Bazzer is the guy to answer this he collects all the variations of CD I think