READ THIS... IMPORTANT INFORMATION UPDATE/S!!! I will do a follow up video to this as I have learnt a lot of things via the comments on this post and many people have (among other things) recommended cd players capable of gapless playback which is really heartening and also super useful. Equally my concern about players incapable of gapless playback has been vindicated as there have been plenty of comments talking about people's experience of them and also naming some of them too. The list below can and will be edited / added to. Let me know if you have had different experiences of the players listed below. I will try to keep it as up to date as I can for a while a least - mostly focusing on newer CD players though I don't know the year of every CD player listed below without checking. Hopefully you will find the listings below of some use... GAPLESS UNITS (VIDEO EVIDENCE FROM A TH-cam SHORT): Ruark R3S / Project CD Box S3 / Project CD Box E / Music Fidelity M2SCD - I have seen video evidence of these kindly provided by a viewer (once again... cheers mate) GAPLESS UNITS (ACCORDING TO POSTS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION): Denon dcd600ne / Audiolab6000cdt / Marantz cd5005 / Marantz cd6007 / XA555ES / Cayin mini CDMKII / Naim CD5SI / SMSL PL200 / Onkyo DX-C390 / Onkyo C-7030 / Panasonic SA-UX100 Marantz SA-8005 / Sharp CD-BH20 / One Concept and Coby CD players / ONN CD players / Luxman DX10X FIRMWARE UPDATES (COMMENTS SECTION & AN EXTERNAL FORUM THREAD: Arcam cd5 had a firmware update to allow gapless playback (from the comments section) The Yamaha CD-S303 also plays gapless after firmware update - the person didn't try it before the update, but I read in another forum thread (based on this video) that the CD-S300 and CD-S303 were not gapless. I asked baldmetalnerd in the comments section of a video of his and he says since firmware update 1.48, it plays gapless and with update 1.61 it is still fine. It was a Yamaha cd player (I'm guessing one of these) that I was told wasn't gapless when I phoned one of the shops. GAPLESS UNITS I TESTED AT CURRYS Denon DM-41DAB / Denon Seol N10 / Panasonic SC-PM272 / Panasonic SA-UX1000E / JVC UX-D752 / JVC-D327B NON GAPLESS UNITS (ACCORDING TO POSTS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION): Tangent CD II (I was told about this one by Richer Sounds too) / Emotiva ERC-3 / Emotiva ERC-4 / Sharp micro audio system / JVC (model unknown) / Shanling EC Mini / ONN mini stereo / Roxel RCD 400 / Victrola 7 in 1 stereo / Sharp CD-BH10 / Jenson 565 (apparently this one has a two second gap between every track!) Sony CDP-338ESD - This one is weird... Apparently the person has two of these and one of them doesn't play gapless, but the other one does. Harman Kardon sound system in a 2019 Subaru & 2 other car cd players (makes unknown) / An old Phillips cd player from the 1980s (which was a surprise - so occasionally older players had this problem it seems) Most shocking to me though was the fact that one person says that their Oppo blu ray player doesn't play gapless in cd mode. NON GAPLESS UNITS (ACCORDING TO EXTERNAL FORUM THREADS RELATING TO THIS VIDEO): a Samsung all in one player from about 15 years ago / Cambridge Audio One. An external forum also mentioned blu ray players by Panasonic and Sony not being able to play gapless... and I thought blu - ray players were safe!!! EDITS TO THIS VIDEO WERE MADE ON THE 31st DECEMBER 2023 (READ BELOW FOR DETAILS): Some of what I have since found out via the comments regarding certain cd players contradicts what I was told by the companies / shops that I spoke to. This could be because the people I spoke to didn't know what they were talking about / were given the wrong info / or that the players in question have been given firmware updates that they were unaware of when I spoke to them... Who knows! Anyway I removed the section where I talked about not being able to find out about any gapless cd players outside of Cambridge Audio along with saying that they were the best company to go for as I no longer believe that to be the case even if a lot of their stuff is very good. The most important thing is that there are many cd players out there which you need to avoid if you want smooth gapless playback and many of the posts in the comments section have indeed confirmed this really is a significant issue as I feared even if it's not quite as bad as I thought at the time of recording this video - well I hope so anyway... I also edited out the bit where I said this problem doesn't happen with blu-ray players in CD mode as it has been mentioned this problem has also affected a couple of those units too (which really sucks)... I talk about all this and more in part 2. Thanks again for all your comments... Stay safe.
I'm sure I replied to one of your posts but sometimes my comments seem to dissappear or I can't see them. TH-cam comments can be glitchy apparently. Anyway I'm glad your very pricey setup is working fine - I would have been worried too...
this is so great - thank you for the update! I want to throw a new entry into the ring: I just got the SMSL PL200 delivered this afternoon (it's a goofy little thing, but I can dig it). I didn't have high hopes, but for my first test I discovered it played Slayer's Post Mortem -> Raining Blood transition perfectly gapless (when using it as a transport, haven't had time to test the dac functionality yet). I'm tickled to death - so happily surprised. So please add SMSL PL200 to the "gapless" list! ETA: to be fair my older TEAC PD-301 is also gapless. I ended up with that after having two misses with other units, which is when I became aware of the problem. It's ok but very slow and a bit noisy when it spins now, which is why I wanted to replace it. It does have a Burr Brown dac in it, which might appeal to many. It's nice and warm but a bit too muddy for my taste.
Onkyo DX-C390 and C-7030 do support gapless correctly as well as hidden first tracks (another problem with many of these CD players). Shanling EC Mini does not do gapless or hidden tracks. Some CDs actually have audio in the gap between tracks, usually applause or crowd noise on live albums - if I recall correctly ELP's Welcome Back My Friends live album does though I don't have the discs around right now. CD players that don't handle gapless correctly will also skip over this audio.
John Darko and other hi-fi reviewers have been complaining about this for years. It's not just CD players, either. Some of the streaming services are not gapless.
I don't think gapless playback is a "feature" so much as lack of gapless playback is a fault. I believe it has something to do with using a CD-ROM and a computer to play back the tracks as "files" rather than simply playing the bits as a stream and updating the track and time information as it goes, which was the older (standard) way of playing them back. I'm guessing treating tracks as files and using a computer chip, probably with Linux, is cheaper than the older purpose built CD playback chips. Disclaimer: I'm just shooting from the hip here without doing any research. Someone with more knowledge, please comment about what I got right and what I got wrong here!
If a CD player from any "audiophile" manufacturer (or even from the Goodmans / Alba type brands) was released when CD was mainstream, they would have been totally slated in the press and wouldn't have sold at all. But rejoice in the fact that you can get "audiophile Ethernet switches" for your streamer system.
You are basically correct. The mechanism is a computer optical drive, they have been for a very long time now. It allows MP3 playback off cd for example. Those mechanisms have no fault, a cd-rom drive can happily read the CD audio gapless, the fault is what you thought, the software is accessing the tracks like files. To play gapless the software merely needs to read ahead by a few seconds, that's it.
Good on you for calling out (current) manufacturers on this - HORRIBLE WORKMANSHIP. Every cheapest crap CD player I had in the 80’s and 90’s did gapless album playback. It’s like they’re trying to force us to abandon physical media and force us into streaming.
Oh... When checking my video for a couple of things there was an ad at the start but I didn't realize it was putting them during the video yet. When I reach a certain level I can choose where to place the ads... That's kind of irritating I will have to monitor this. Cheers for letting me know.
I am surprised that any CD player would not be gapless because the tracks are not separate in the redbook standard: the digital stream is continuous (like an LP) and the table of contents merely marks the start and end timecodes for each track. Gapless playback used to an issue only for DAPs because there each track is a separate file and theres metadata to load, frame alignment issues etc. that make gapless playback trickier
I don't understand how this can happen when CDs are gapless by design. This is why I stick with my 20+ year old players which still all work perfectly.
I didn't even know this was a thing. I have only ever owned "gapless" cd players. I include my four discmans, three boom boxes and one Sony deck. It just sounds like the modern "don't give a toss" consumer world we live in.
There has to be some kind of programming issue in the player that's adding the gap. CDs are gapless by design, they are just a PCM audio stream with track markers where songs start/end
Yeah. Something in the firmware is asking the drive to read data between a certain range, then stopping the stream, requesting the next range, and restarting it. It's a daft methodology that should've immediately been obviously _the wrong approach_ to anyone qualified to build a CD player. I had to check that this wasn't posted in April just to believe that something with such a blatantly foolish error actually exists.
Way back, I decided to replace my vintage NEC CD player with an Oppo blueray player. The Oppo is slow to load and also will not play CDs gapless. It seems that all these newer players and transports rely on Embedded Linux operating systems instead of pure hardware logic (application specific integrated circuits) and as such, don't exhibit that instant-on performance. Noobs wouldn't know any different, but older folk who appreciate CDs as a great form of archival likely would. This gapless issue bugged me so much, more than ten years ago, that I went out looking for a higher end Vintage CD player that I keep in my system and it is a true value, with no waiting to load. I paid a fraction of it's original MSRP and the on board DACs are still to this day, pretty darn good. I doubt anyone would be able to hear the difference between it and the Oppo.
So I run an oppo for cd playback as well as hi res files I have on some external drives. I was disappointed when I got it as i thought it didn’t have gapless playback. As it turns out, they added gapless playback in a firmware upgrade and it’s just not obvious how to engage it. When you go to hit play on something, you’ve gotta first hit the option button on the remote and choose gapless play. Not sure that this would even apply to the particular oppo you owned but I thought I’d share.
Just recently (3 or 4 days ago) someone mentioned this in a German forum in a discussion about a new hifi CD player. Since then I was thinking about this issue a bit, remembering that one of my cheap CD-players that I had when I was a kid also had this issue (bought somewhat in between 2005 and 2010). And now it just so happened that your video was recommended to me :D This problem however would also really annoy me, especially when we talk about HiFi equipment - so much, that this would make me not buy it!
I ran in to this issue a few years ago, when I needed to replace my old CD-player from the 90's. I almost pulled a trigger on one model (it was probably Cambridge Audio), but read some reviews and someone had pointed out this issue. At first I couldn't even believe it. I'm not quite sure now, but I think I checked back then that the gapless plyback is a part of the Redbook standard for CD's. If my memory serves, the only place that the Redbook defines that there should be a gap is 2-3 second pre-gap with index 0 on the first track (and that should not be normally played). Back then I just bought a different brand CD-player. Functionally that new one still leaves much to be desired comparing how the old 90's player worked before it broke. The old one was probably the cheapest separate CD-player aavailable when it was bought. I think this problem is worse for the music than anything that any half way decent cheap DAC can do to the audio quality, so Cambridge Audio and probably others too are wasting their good DAC:s on these players. The albums are not playing the way they were designed to play. Some equipment fanboys may disagree, but they are listening to equipment more than music. Streaming services are not always an answer even if they have the albums. It seems they have been provided masters that don't play gapless for some records.
Good grief. Imagine if the tracks start instantly but they're split in the wrong place. One song will briefly pause before the very end of it plays (start of the next track), then the next one starts. I have a few albums with the tracks split in the wrong place. It's very annoying.
It's frankly impressive that they've managed to insert gaps at all. A CD is one continuous stream of audio, with a contents table at the start telling the player what ranges of samples belong to what track. All the player has to do when the track changes is increment the number on the screen. It doesn't even have to move the laser and buffer.
A friend of mine bought a Cambridge Topaz cd player a few years ago and he had the same 2 sec gap between tracks,in his cd manual it said the 2 second gap was there to protect the circuits in the player. It annoyed him so much he sold it a few months later.
Emotiva ERC-4 does NOT do gapless playback and I didn't even know it's a thing when I was buying it. It's horrendus experiance. It required having additional transport player tied up with ERC-4 DAC to somehow recover from this nonsense. I immediately reached to Emotiva and got assurance that it will be fixed in their next CD product which is all we can do to stop the gap disaster. From previous and current experiances I've come to conclusion that the problem exists with CD players that have a capability to read CD and DVD discs as if passing from track to track required "rethink" of what type of disc is actually spinning. Maybe it's coincidence, but no CD disc only player that I used was gapless disabled. Thanks for the video!
I think the problem with many devices nowadays is that they are built from components instead of being built from scratch. Cambridge has always done this to some extent (they used to just take a perfectly fine CD player from Philips or some such, and replace the audio part by something that audiophiles would pay extra money for) and I wouldn't be surprised if you open that player up, you'll see a CD drive like you would see in a computer, connected to a microcontroller that controls it. In itself that's not a big problem: CD drives can do the same things as CD players can do including non-stop playback. Just tell them to start playing at a certain time code and they'll play happily until they reach the lead-out. But it looks like in this case, the microcontroller just tells it to play track 1 from beginning to end, and when the track is over, it tells the drive to play track 2, etc. So between the tracks, the drive stops playing and waits for the next command, and then it seeks to the beginning of the next track. And there's a good chance that the microcontroller is involved with reading the audio data from the IDA/ATA bus of the CD drive, and send it to the DAC (possibly after processing). So this is purely a software problem, and a rather stupid one. An older CD player (from, say, before 2000) will always have a mechanism that's directly connected to the DAC, and is otherwise pretty dumb. The microcontroller in such CD players is not very powerful and controls the mechanism directly unlike modern players. Even if you tell it to play tracks 2, 3, 6, 7, it knows not to stop the playback between 2 and 3 or 6 and 7, only after track 3. You would have to force it to leave a gap by telling it to play only track 2, then only track 3, etc. There's another problem with modern CD players (and other optical players, even the ones that ARE programmed correctly for gapless playback) which is that almost none of them send P and Q subcodes to the SPDIF output anymore, which means that if you use a DAT or DCC recorder to record a CD digitally, it won't automatically mark the beginning of the tracks on the tape.
I am using a very inexpensive DVD player as a transport to my D/A converter. I still have gaps. I have tried to source a good quality, dedicated CD player that IS GAPLESS. I could not find one. I may try a Blu-ray player as a transport, if that will play gapless; I hear some will play SACD discs also. I love my D/A converter, so that may be the only gapless option. The situation is ridiculous. High-end CD players sound better than they ever have, and they still can't manage to play "Dark Side Of The Moon" without a pause between tracks😢.
Considering how many dance CDs I own, this is a complete shock to me! Still have an old CD player that plays them just fine. I’d be really mad if I bought a player that didn’t play them gapless.
This is a problem with some streaming boxes too. I have a Tascam CDRW900SL CD recorder, a Marantz SA-7001 SACD player, and an old Panasonic DVD-S47 DVD player I use occasionally as a transport and they all offer gapless playback. I also have a Cambridge Azur 851N network streamer and that streams gaplessly too. I am very surprised the Cambridge CD player doesn't offer it.
I already have my CD player, but a test I do every time I decide to upgrade it is to take my copy of Abbey Road and play the medley. If it doesn’t play hapless, then I pass on it.
Thank you for your video. As a music lover who listens to classical music, the lack of gapless playback is a huge frustration. It's become a problem not just for new CD players but for practically any contemporary device or app that enables music playback. And beware: for those products that claim to feature gapless, the implementation can be sub-par.
I've been planning on buying a new CD player for the first time in almost a decade, and I NEVER would have considered this possibility. This was super helpful, and I'll definitely be doing more research into whatever I end up buying.
To alert people like yourself of this debacle is exactly why I did this video. You're right... I wouldn't have even predicted it as an issue until it came up. Thanks for watching
I have an ONN mini stereo that not only puts gaps in between tracks but each track fades in instead of starting at normal volume. Imagine something like "A Hard Days Night" on this thing. Super annoying!
this is an absolute deal breaker for me. I'm still using a fairly meh teac only because it supports gapless playback. I don't care if Cambridge is "better" in other ways - I will not touch that! This is not rocket science. I would *really* appreciate an episode that covers the models that *do* support gapless playback (no criticism of you, I get it - you looked and found bupkis). I am looking at the new Shanling models but can't find any info regarding whether they do gapless or not. It's driving me mad.
Because of the good response I have had with this I will no more than a few months time do a follow-up video. I am noting down the new players that people are saying are gapless in the comments and I have discovered one store near me that does a load of audio lab CD players which are apparently gapless. So yes I am definitely thinking that will be a good thing to do.
I bought a JVC CD player a few years ago that did not do gapless, and I was horrified. Marillion's FEAR was horrible to listen to. I ditched it and got a second hand Marantz instead which is fine. I didn't realise this problem had spread though. My understanding is that gapless playback is part of the original Red book CD standard, so any player that can't do it is defective by definition.
Great video. You made me research this a little further. One explanation I’ve read is that the CD players are coping the tracks in memory. Meaning you’re not hearing the CD off the laser, but the back-up version. This is used as an error buffer. Which makes sense in a car (with bumps and shocks) but not so useful for a Hi-Fi component. If I was to speculate - Perhaps with production of optical drives decreasing, these companies are using chips from the automobile industry? Cars were a long time hold out for CDs so they’d be plenty of chips out there. One other thing regarding the 2009 Abbey Road CD: there’s multimedia content on that disc (short doco) that may be tricking the CD player in your car to think it’s a data disc.
Not exactly. Because the format of audio on a CD was never a literally continuous stream like a vinyl record or cassette, it has always required at least a very small buffer. Anti-skip came along when memory got cheaper, and that buffer grew much, much longer to allow the transport to "catch up" if it lost track. So, even if your guess is correct, and some player copies tracks into memory, in full, one at a time... there's still no excuse for this. The memory buffer would have to be sufficient to store an entire CD's worth of audio, in the worst case that a disc was actually just one long track. (And apparently, that's supposed to be what we do now, if you ask the shops close to our host.) If it's big enough to accomplish this -- which isn't much to ask nowadays, with 1GB of memory being kind of at the lower end of what you can buy from commodity IC vendors anyway -- then there's no reason it couldn't just buffer the next track too, or the whole disc, or at least the next 30 seconds whether it's part of the same track or not. Enforcing hard cutoffs at track boundaries has no technical purpose. It was just a poor decision by the software engineer, that somehow didn't raise alarm bells by anyone else at a company that pretends to care enough about audio to manufacture appliances for playing it.
Everything I've read said the Yamaha CD-S303 is NOT gapless. I bought one about two months ago and immediately applied the firmware update, and I can that at least my machine plays gapless CDs flawlessly. I don't know if it didn't prior to the firmware update because I hadn't played any before then, but I know it works now.
I bought the same player a month ago.During that time i was just listening to CDs with 2 sec gaps,i hadn't played a seamless CD.Soon as i watch this video i went and played DSOTM and Sgt Pepper and they both played fine,thankfully.
I faced this issue a few years ago when searching for a new mini system as the one I had at the time had this extremely annoying problem. I did eventually manage to find a system from Panasonic that had all the features I wanted and played gapless CD albums properly but boy, what a rabbit hole to find one. It became quite apparent to me at the time that the salespeople didn't have a clue what I was talking about and came up with some pretty lame ideas about overcoming the limitations of players that wouldn't play gapless. My response to them was always the same: "Under the terms of the Sale of Goods Act, an item must be fit for its intended purpose" and then I would leave the store. I also have a little cheap portable basic from Sony that also plays gapless. It is a ludicrous situation when a £30 system can do what a £300 system can't.
Interesting stuff, I didn’t know of this problem. While my older equipment still works well, with dwindling options for music collectors, if I ever needed a replacement cd player I would now opt for a good Blu-ray player, but rather than rely it’s built in DA converter, use separate DA box to do the decoding to analogue (this should give a consistent output no matter what optical transport you use). Yes it does mean adding an extra box, but this has the advantage as most Blu-ray will also play HD audio, DVD-A and SACD too. The quality but affordable hifi hay-day is unfortunately over. I suspect the gap issue is down to the same chips being used in all these products. It’s important to note that most hifi products will have an array of components made by other manufacturers, not everything under the hood will be made by the brand you buy.
I completely agree, and will also point out how the modern players that will also play SACDs and DVD-Audios are screwing up and cannot properly handle the surround channels, even though the original discs are encoded correctly. I heard about this at the Life In Surround youtube channel. Thanks.
Another reason why it's better getting an old DVD player with a digital audio out and plug it into external DAC. Decent CD players from 90s in good working condition are getting harder to find. Modern stuff is either crappy or too expensive.
This "problem" is the reason I've went back to CDs. Thankfully my hardware performs as expected, but this is infuriating. No streaming service offers these albums as intended. My Denon receiver plays .flac files in a playlist gapless. Thanks for highlighting something to look out for.
By the way Amazon music HD does play gapless. I have it on my phone and I always download it via the app onto my phone first so that I'm not technically streaming it and get (in theory) full quality playback. I would have gone for Spotify but to my knowledge they don't yet do full quality even though their MP3 quality is meant to be a lot better than it used to be... Not saying it's the best but it's what I use. My friend uses apple music which I had for a while and also plays gapless and in HD (I think)...
I have the Cambridge Audio CXC Transport and it supports gapless playback. A CD transport requires an external DAC for playback. There aren't any Line Out connections only digital ones. I use a Schiit Audio Bifrost 2/64 DAC.
Just because they're a transport doesn't necessarily mean that they support gapless automatically. Gapless playback is related to the processing software inside the CD player or transport that actually transport that information from the reading laser and feed it outward. If that chip is not set up or programmed to support gapless it doesn't matter what DAC you run it into it will not be gapless. Thanks and have a good day
The gap in the audio is a result of the mute circuit of the CD player. To prevent unwanted noise prior to the music playback the software in the CD player automatically mutes the output from the DAC (digital to analogue converter). The CD format is defined in the Philips Red Book standard. The data on the CD contains sub-codes. P sub‑code contains information about where the music starts and ends, and the Q sub‑code contains absolute and relative time information. The software in the bad CD player is incorrectly responding to the P sub-codes. The good CD player probably ignores the P sub-codes and only uses the Q sub-codes. This is a software problem that the manufacturer of the CD player should have addressed. The CD player software might also mute the DAC when the data is all zeros.
The Cambridge Audio Topaz CD10 uses a Wolfson Microelectronics WM8725 DAC chip. The mute function is controlled via pin 10 of the chip. This input line of the chip has an internal pull-down and normally the audio output is enabled. A line from the microcontroller drives Pin 10 high when the software wishes to mute the audio output. So, you could isolate Pin 10 of the chip and thereby permanently inhibit the mute function. @@alansteadreviews
Nice video; I first discovered this problem many years ago but not with CDs. I discovered that almost all software players would not play gapless. Also, as an opera listener, this is much more noticeable. All opera CDs are split into tracks for convenience and to comply with operatic convention so that arias are selectable. A gap in an opera sounds terrible. Most newer software has been updated to be gapless and there are CD players that can do likewise. I guess that many CD purchasers have a collection that does not really matter.
I have a Denon dcd-800ne, which is not an old model, it luckily plays all my cds gapless. I wouldn't be able to live with a cd player that didn't do gapless playback. Kinda weird that this is suddenly a thing, i haven't heard a single player since the 80s that didn't easily handle gapless playback.
I didn't even think about this issue and automatically assumed that all CD players have gapless playback. Fortunately, even my new cheap portable CD player has gapless playback. Thanks!
Liked! Subscribed! First I've heard of this on a CD player, and I'm shocked! Non-gapless playback is an issue on streaming services, and I wonder why they can't get that right either.
I've used a lot of CD players in my life but I've never come across one that doesn't do gapless playback. I'm not as surprised to see this as I should be, though. Physical media isn't being taken as seriously by manufacturers as it used to be.
Roxel RCD 400 inserts gaps, I queried with the manufacturer last year to see if there was a firmware upgrade to sort it but unfortunately not, that's what its supposed to do! I posted a warning review on amazon at the time. I ended up buying a secondhand old player instead.
I have a newer (one year old) DENON DCD-600NE cd player that plays without gaps. I have listened to quite a few live recordings that have played seamlessly. So you can add this Denon to your gapless list. Strange thing is, I seem to recall reading online somewhere shortly after I bought it, that this unit inserted gaps between the tracks, but it definitely does not.
Gapless playback has been very important to me as both a listener and creator. For the latter, this was why I invested in a DAW made for mastering (Steinberg WaveLab) to ensure that the CDs of my own music will be the way I wanted to them be: index markers at the right spot and gapless playback. This is also why I like listening to complete album videos or downloads as they ensure continuous playback.
You bring up a good point. On the production side of things, the mastering engineer and artist(s) specifically sequenced the album and timed out the pauses between music. To add to this timing is disingenuous to the music. Never mind orchestral, choral, chamber, ambient and other genres which will be interrupted by the gap more often than not.
We need a list of gapless vs not gapless (Crap) CD players. And very simply, we consumers should only buy the gapless players. This will force the non-gapless manufacturers to get their act together and care a bit about basic fundamental playback features. And offer gapless players again. Amazing how it's 2023 and there are actually issues with something as simple as a CD player. Or is this just their way of making you purchase their streamers? - lol. 😮😮😮
Absolutely. As for my part, I'm putting together a list of cd players recommended in the comments and will visit some other shops so at some point I can include them in a follow up video. There are plenty out there it seems from the comments which is encouraging, but also unfortunately there are plenty of non gapless ones too...
@@alansteadreviews Thank you. That's a good idea. This video makes me want to go around the house and test all of my players, but most of them were made in the late '80s and '90s so I don't expect any issues. I've also procured a bunch of DVD players that I use strictly for CD players. They have very good audio quality, but I'll need to test them too with the right type of CD with songs that flow right into the next ones, like a medley. I saw the ones you mentioned. Good. I know one or two of my Elton John CDs have this. I think "The Fox" CD may have it. And "Good Bye Yellow Brick Road" where "Funeral For a Friend" segues into "Love Lies Bleeding'. I'm almost positive they go right into each other.
I found this out to my chagrin after mastering my independent prog rock album that I spent thousands making, in a gapless format. After testing the cd in cars I would find that 1 in 10 car stereos would add gaps to what should have been gapless transitions. Even more horrifying is that, I found many of the wav/mp3/flac computer players also did not support gapless play. Being a ludite, I still use itunes (which does support gapless) and would never have thought manufacturers/programmers/creaters of cd players/wav players etc would overlook this issue.
I did some digging about this & looks like you are right-- a significant number of players insert a gap between tracks. I've never had a player with the issue. I had an Oppo & now have a Cambridge universal player. I also have a Pro-ject RS CD transport (circa 2019). It's been suggested that some transports use mechanisms designed for computer drives that can't avoid a break between tracks. Many of Pro-ject's players use a new mechanism made by another Austrian company. Cambridge is only showing one current CD player (the AXC 35), which does do gapless playback.
My axc25 does does gapless playback too, and I was under the impression that there are other players did too. I may have to confirm this at some point.
As someone who has more computer optical drives than is reasonable, rational, or defensible ... The fact that they are computer drives is not the reason. The fact that they are driven by incompetent software is absolutely the reason. Computer drives see audio CDs the way the see any other CD... a collection of sectors. Whether those sectors contain audio or any other form of data is pretty much irrelevant. Some firmware of early, early drives (like circa 1992, give or take a few years) didn't have a command to tell them to read audio sectors and return the raw data to the host computer, so the only thing you could do is tell the drive itself to read the data and output analog audio from the front-panel headphone jack, and the rear-panel audio output (which connected to the sound card, or a pass-through to RCA jacks.) This changed a few years later, and the process of reading audio sectors as data (and returning that data to the computer, instead of playing it in the drive) became known as "ripping" or "digital audio extraction." It took a little while, but this became the de-facto way of playing audio from CDs, and by the late Windows XP era, practically no CD Player software was still asking the drive to do the playback. It was all handled as a stream of data, managed by the OS audio stack, and output from the soundcard the same way it would've from a WAV file or MP3. This became SO ubiquitous, that drives stopped shipping with any front-panel audio controls, headphones jacks, or volume knobs. Just a tray, an eject button, and an activity LED. Not long after that, the audio output on the back disappeared, too. The ONLY way to get audio out of those drives was digitally, through the ribbon / SATA cable. So if you were to buy a brand-new optical drive today, it probably wouldn't have an analog audio interface of any kind. Just a power and host data connector. You would be expected to ask for audio sectors as data, and then what you do with them is up to you. I.e., the solution to a gap between tracks is.... to not stop and restart the digital audio output between tracks. Just treat the DAC output like a stream, and keep shoveling data into it. There is NO reason for a gap, because the passing of data between the disc and the audio outputs is asynchronous in so many places already, that the design by definition has to manage the flow to ensure it's always enough, and never too much. The drive doesn't care about tracks -- it never did. The very concept only exists for our convenience. It's just metadata, tucked in alongside the audio data on the disc. To the drive, it's just one big long pool of sectors, the meaning of which is completely unimportant.
I listen (mostly) to classical music. There are numerous instances where tracks should run continuously, even though they are indexed separately. But one piece that even many pop/rock enthusiasts may have in their collections is Beethoven's 5th Symphony. The last two movements run together. Beethoven's 6th Symphony has *three* movements that run continuously. I'm not currently in the market for a player, but I'm astonished that gapless playback -- which we've had since the invention of the CD -- is now unavailable in new players.
Yes, the Pastoral is a big problem on systems that won't play gapless. I have one classical CD that has 23 tracks on it that are all gapless and 3 extra tracks that are not. Luckily my current Panasonic system - that took me almost a year to find - plays them properly.
I guess the problem is that these are not CD players in classical sense but instead little computers (microcontrollers) which "rip" the data from the disc one track at a time.
Don't know what's going on here as all the cd players that I have tried recently are all gapless, so I don't know who you were talking to. Cambridge Audio Topaz is a strange one and is old. The new transports from Cambridge is gapless.
It seems Cambridge Audio has sorted the issue now. No luck with all the other cd players I found out about though but I'm sure there must be some more out there... One would hope
The fact that a finished product like this exists in the world is just embarrassing. We are truly living in a post-HiFi world. These things are a shallow mockery of the equipment they are designed to resemble.
I’m surprised at the Cambridge! I have the CXC CD Transport, a current model which definitely does play gaplessly. That would drive me mad as apart from DSOTM etc, I have many live albums. I knew this could be an issue with streaming but didn’t realise it affected CDs.
Yes indeed, many new CD players won't play gaplessly - yet I see people around the web gaslighting us that you aren't telling the truth. I have one of the Tangent pieces of junk that inserts a gap between 'tracks' where a seemless piece of music is intended. Every bought classical symphony album is affected, also albums by Pink Floyd, JMJ, etc - all now glitchy.
I remember when iTunes first came out and having ripped all my CDs (hundreds of them) discovered that it played gaps between tracks which infuriated me. I also discovered around the same time that Toast put gaps between tracks (2.0 seconds, I think) by default so had to remove all the gaps manually before burning. The 2.0 second gap before the first track, whatever purpose that served, could not be removed for some reason. I can't remember exactly when iTunes went 'gapless' was phased out but it was clearly due to user demand. This seems to be an incredibly retrograde move. One can only hope that it was an oversight rather than a deliberate decision.
It's why I didn't bother with an iPod back in the day. I still don't own one I just skipped straight just to streaming. I use iTunes though and put everything as wav.
The 2 second intro is a CD standard, but can be reduced down to zero (except for the first track, which players don't play). In theory, lossless audio should not have gaps, so not require "gapless" playback.
CDs are already digital. When you rip them to your PC, you’re moving from one medium to another, you aren’t digitising them. This is responding to your remark about digitising your CDs.
Ripping is the technically correct term. By the way, use software that has secure ripping, ensuring the audio is correctly transferred. EAC, db PowerAmp, and MusicBee are some options.
I was totally unaware of this problem effecting modern CD Players. The only time I've encountered this problem was with early versions of the iTunes software. My Arcam alpha 9 is gapless thankfully. Its 25 years old and still works flawlessly. I will keep this in mind though, come the time when I need to upgrade thanks.
Ive seen this before & it drives me nuts. I have noticed it streaming far more frequently than with cd players. In some cases its a software issue. In other instances it’s hardware based. I don’t know why it has to be so complicated.
I had a midlevel Kenwood portable CD in the early '90s that did this, and I didn't even realize it. Right before the end of a track, the display would switch from elapsed time, to a :03, :02, :01 countdown, and the next track would begin playing flawlessly. It had an early anti-skip, so this must have been the buffer being displayed while it played ahead.
Some albums have tracks concealed within the countdowns on players that show them, otherwise they simply appear at the end of the track that you are playing. It's a shame my AXC25 doesn't show the countdown... Another cutback no doubt.
The "negative time" counter was a normal condition called the pre-track gap. The table of contents (TOC) on a CD has index markers for every track, that technically begin at Index 0. This is the time code marker that defines the beginning of a track's pre-track gap. The original CD specification called for a 2-second gap between tracks, so you would see -- 00:01, -- 00:00, then the actual track would begin, at a position indicated in the TOC as Index 1 (what the track time readout would display as 00:00). The disc author could elect to add additional index markers (2 through 99) to break the track into further seekable segments, but very few consumer-oriented CD players ever exposed the indexes within a track on the display, or had any buttons to navigate them. Regardless Index 0 and Index 1 are a mandatory component of the TOC for every track. It didn't take long before authors realized that 1) the gap between tracks is really just a time code detail, and is otherwise still exactly the same as every other block of data (or, "sector") on a CD audio disc -- ergo, there's no reason it _has to_ be silent. In other words, you can stick audio in there during the countdown between tracks. 2) Also, the whole mandatory 2-second gap thing is just dumb, and there's no good reason for it. Moreover, CD players didn't seem to mind at all if you left it out, and authored the disc with Index 0 and Index 1 pointing to the exact same time code. With those two realizations, we could have audio than ran continuously between tracks -- particularly relevant for live albums, but also popular with concept albums. As the CD format carried on, it became commonplace for tracks to have any length of gap between them, from none at all, to having entire songs hidden in the negative-space between tracks. It's actually easier for a player to read audio sectors without any concern or even awareness whatsoever for their position in a track. The processor that handles things like the display and features like repeat and program and random-play modes can pipe up if we should do anything other than just read the next sector after this one, and so on, until we reach the end of the disc or somebody presses Stop. Anti-skip buffers don't really change that. They just insert a longer time delay between when the data is read, and when it is played by the DAC. ALL audio CD players have a buffer -- ever since the first CD player ever made. They have to, because the audio isn't actually a continuous stream on the disc. It's encoded and shuffled around a bit to make it easier to track, and to prevent minor optical imperfections from making the data unreadable. Anti-skip was just a clever extension that added significantly more buffer memory. The other component -- a variable-speed transport -- was already there, too. Discs spin at a different rate when reading the inside circumference than the outside circumference, so they tweaked the spindle controller to allow it to read a little bit faster when it needed to fill, or refill, the buffer. It's possible anti-skip would've been there on day one, if memory had been cheaper in the 80s. But, several seconds of 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo audio takes quite a bit of memory, and that would've been prohibitively expensive before the early 90s.
Sharp's CD-BH10 shelf system adds a gap between songs (but the CD-BH20 is gapless). There is NOTHING in the product descriptions to give you a heads-up. Ugh.
I cant believe this. I used to copy cds and had to make sure it had no gap and burn app did not add app. I assumed that all cd players should play it as made, this is crazy, why would they go against how cd is designed to be played.
It’s great that you made this video and articulated this problem. This has been driving me crazy as well. It is extraordinary that the actual spec for a CD drive would not contain an insistence on gapless playback. It makes no sense to have anything other than that. I also have a cheap portable that plays gapless. Just bought a Sharp micro audio system that does not have it. I bought a Buick Enclave in 2017 when CD players were being phased out so they could hook people on satellite radio. The Buick has a CD player and that’s why I chose it over anything else in the lot. I was horrified to find that it does not play back gapless. I record a lot of my own music direct to a Tascam CD recorder and often the tracks run into each other. Without gapless it pauses for a second between each track. Ridiculous. The licensing of CD spec hardware should absolutely not lower the level of quality in playback. The Tascam CD recorders are excellent, robust machines that playback perfectly and also record as easily as a cassette deck. I was surprised to see an actual hi-if deck used as an example that was not gapless. I’m convinced at this point that the biggest players in tech are deliberately sabotaging the quality levels to intentionally create more anxiety and anger. There was a time when audio and computer technology was extremely competitive and strived every year to make things better and to offer more features. That’s completely gone. Now computers, phones and tablets have many little problems that are both software and hardware related and while some are addressed in updates, many never are. Audio gear is going the same way. It’s a real travesty. I recently rediscovered the cassette. Got my old 3 head JVC repaired and was blown away by the beauty of that technology and the machine. So much mechanical ingenuity and excellence. Even in the cassette itself. Today they are introducing some new cassette machines and they are all stripped of features and are reportedly very cheap. It’s really sad to see this.
Just a technical note about the MP3 comment: Yes, MP3 as a format has a problem with gapless playback. The audio is stored in frames, and there's no granularity less than that. So if the original audio doesn't happen to be a length multiple of MP3 frames, then the last few samples will be contained in a frame that will be decoded in full, with a smidge of additional silence at the end. There is a solution to this, and it's pretty well supported: Add a header that defines the original source length, in samples, so the decoder can process exactly that many, and discard whatever remains at the tail end. The MP3 format is just a long train of frames stuck end-to-end, and each frame begins with a synchronization pattern that you can detect and begin acting upon. If the decoder gets to the end of a frame, and the next few bytes don't contain a sync pattern, it just keeps scanning until it finds one. The side-effect of this is, you can insert any kind of arbitrary data you want before or between or after valid frames -- and so we have. ID3, Xing, LAME... all tags of non-MP3 data just tacked on to one end or the other of the stream. And as long as the tag is kept intact, and the audio frames aren't edited without updating the tag, then we can add non-native features like gapless playback and accurate seeking.
I've not heard anything about frames before regarding the MP3 format. What I can say is that MP3 a lossy codec, not encoding all of the available fidelity, so to speak. Instead of MP3, use the FLAC format or Apple Lossless. These are both data compressed for small file size but the audio is lossless so you get back the same fidelity that was on the CD or WAV file, etc. upon decoding at playback. I prefer FLAC files, but iOS doesn't support them natively. There are apps that support FLAC playback, though.
Also a problem, some newer CDs put gaps between tracks that shouldn't be there. I bought a standup act by Jim Gaffigan and there were gaps between bits, and it wasn't the CD player. It made listening to it unbearable.
NONE?!!!! (In response to your short list of CD players that have gapless capability) That is CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!! The only stereo I EVER experienced without gapless was my first one, which was a JVC boom box from like '91. All my Sony discmen I purchased (and I purchased A LOT) they all were gapless. Then I went to iPod so I remember briefly Apple had to add a toggle for gapless tracks but it was relatively early in the iPod age. So why on Earth are these companies dropping the gapless thing. PS - F*_K streaming!!! I agree with you, vinyl is great and stuff but seriously CD will give the best quality, convenient, and rippable. BRING BACK SACD!!!!
It turns out as per the comments I have been receiving that there are quite a few gapless ones out there so not as bad as I thought. I just had some bad luck with the places I rang I guess. There were also quite a few non gapless ones too though. I am noting them all down and will do a follow-up video covering them and other things. In the meantime I may pin a comment of my own listing them on this video comments section...
I have an old Yamaha CDR-HD1500 which plays cd and you can rip them to hard disk and that plays the Dark side of the moon with gapless playback no problem. I didn't realise that this was an issue on new players. I guess I will be keeping this player as long as I can. Interesting content I have subscribed.
I bought a Cambridge Audio AXR100D Receiver/Amplifier last week, and this had a defect of another kind that would annoy CD lovers, amongst others. When you play an album / single on either CD or a digital audio player, connected to the AXR using digital cables (either optical or coaxial), the first few split seconds are missing from the first track on the album or single. Not noticeable if the particular track starts quietly, but if it kicks in with a beat, guitar, vocal, etc. you miss the first split seconds of the track and hear an audible click. In particular, it can make shuffling digital singles quite excruciating. Cambridge Audio sent me a replacement unit, and exactly the same fault was present. They said they have no other reports of this defect, but I think it's present in every unit and casual users just haven't noticed it. So another example of they not having attention to detail or testing their products extensively enough. I'm returning for a refund and getting a Denon AVR-X2800 instead.
Great video. I recently read about a recent Arcam model with this issue. Apparently Arcam released a firmware update to fix it. CD players shouldn’t need firmware updates. It has one job and that’s to play CDs, over complicated computer derived tech is mostly junk IMO. Gap less playback is obviously becoming a common problem across the board. Sadly today’s CD players are just junk compared to the machines from the 90s.
Hi Alan, you definitely got my attention with this video. I’ve had an Audiolab 6000CDT CD transport for the last 3 years, and I haven’t experienced that problem. I have a couple of older players that also don’t have issues with playback. Keep up the good work! 👍
Gapless is a technical issue that appeared since streaming era. I never heard of a gapless issue with cd players. All my cd played tracks seamlessly. So happy as a first owner of a build like a tank denon dcd 3000 from 1996 that still plays superb
There was a discussion on Audiokarma about this topic a few days ago. I think he was referring to a Yamaha player. I replied that the Yamaha CD-S303 I recently purchased was gapless. I also have a 34 Technics player that is superb.
We had one in our household back in 1991. I remember noticing it when playing MCMXC a.D. by Enigma which is a segued album. So it is not a new problem. Can't be sure of the brand, I think it was a Technics.
If you have a CD player that inserts gaps, then try using an external DAC (connected to the RCA Coaxial or TOSLink digital output). This digital output is taken prior to the CD player’s on-board DAC and will bypass the problematic software mute. The external DAC will have its own soft-mute, but generally this only activates at power-up, or for a data receive or clock lock error.
Based on people on forums and on here saying that the Marantz CD5005 (2014) and CD6007 (2020) are gapless, I've just bought a CD6004 (2011) with recently cleaned lens and recently lubricated tray mechanism, as that was what I could afford. I hope it's also gapless, and will be seeing (hearing?) if it is as soon as it arrives. (EDIT 6 days later) to my relief, yes my CD6004 does play gapless! The short is on my channel.
I've never seen a CD player, DVD player, or Blu-Ray player that did not offer gapless playback of CD's, and I say that as a professional audio technician who has serviced audio gear since 1977. Even my first CD player, a Yamaha purchased in 1985, had gapless playback. Any new CD player found to be incapable of gapless playback should be RMA'd back to the manufacturer as defective, or simply returned to the dealer for a refund. BTW, I featured a link to this video on my Community page. Hopefully, this will drive a few viewers your way.
That’s horrible. All cd players used to be gapless. What’s even worse in this age of streaming is that the gap is often baked in in the tracks. I first encountered it when I bought a download of an opera-there was fade at the beginning and end of all tracks. This was many years ago, but those gaps are still there in many operas on streaming services 🤬
I haven't listened to any of my CDs in several years. I cannot remember if they would play gapless or not. I used Pioneer in my car and at home. I still have the home one, since I bought it in '99. I will have to go check it.
I remember back in the 90's a DJ on the radio was complaining their professional (expensive) CD players could do anything like pitch control, repeat short selections, play in reverse etcetera but could NOT play gapless. Sounds to me like it has to do with buffering the track in memory.
Interesting, I've been listening to cd's for like 40 years, and over those many years on various cd players and have never experienced non-gapless playback. Maybe I'm just lucky.
You're not just lucky. This is very much a 2023 kind of problem. Companies designing audio products up until recently weren't creating products for hipsters to use as decorations and statement pieces. (Well, maybe B&O were...) They were designed to be functional.
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READ THIS... IMPORTANT INFORMATION UPDATE/S!!!
I will do a follow up video to this as I have learnt a lot of things via the comments on this post and many people have (among other things) recommended cd players capable of gapless playback which is really heartening and also super useful. Equally my concern about players incapable of gapless playback has been vindicated as there have been plenty of comments talking about people's experience of them and also naming some of them too.
The list below can and will be edited / added to. Let me know if you have had different experiences of the players listed below. I will try to keep it as up to date as I can for a while a least - mostly focusing on newer CD players though I don't know the year of every CD player listed below without checking. Hopefully you will find the listings below of some use...
GAPLESS UNITS (VIDEO EVIDENCE FROM A TH-cam SHORT):
Ruark R3S / Project CD Box S3 / Project CD Box E / Music Fidelity M2SCD - I have seen video evidence of these kindly provided by a viewer (once again... cheers mate)
GAPLESS UNITS (ACCORDING TO POSTS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION):
Denon dcd600ne / Audiolab6000cdt / Marantz cd5005 / Marantz cd6007 / XA555ES / Cayin mini CDMKII / Naim CD5SI / SMSL PL200 / Onkyo DX-C390 / Onkyo C-7030 / Panasonic SA-UX100
Marantz SA-8005 / Sharp CD-BH20 / One Concept and Coby CD players / ONN CD players / Luxman DX10X
FIRMWARE UPDATES (COMMENTS SECTION & AN EXTERNAL FORUM THREAD:
Arcam cd5 had a firmware update to allow gapless playback (from the comments section)
The Yamaha CD-S303 also plays gapless after firmware update - the person didn't try it before the update, but I read in another forum thread (based on this video) that the CD-S300 and CD-S303 were not gapless. I asked baldmetalnerd in the comments section of a video of his and he says since firmware update 1.48, it plays gapless and with update 1.61 it is still fine. It was a Yamaha cd player (I'm guessing one of these) that I was told wasn't gapless when I phoned one of the shops.
GAPLESS UNITS I TESTED AT CURRYS
Denon DM-41DAB / Denon Seol N10 / Panasonic SC-PM272 / Panasonic SA-UX1000E / JVC UX-D752 / JVC-D327B
NON GAPLESS UNITS (ACCORDING TO POSTS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION):
Tangent CD II (I was told about this one by Richer Sounds too) / Emotiva ERC-3 / Emotiva ERC-4 / Sharp micro audio system / JVC (model unknown) / Shanling EC Mini /
ONN mini stereo / Roxel RCD 400 / Victrola 7 in 1 stereo / Sharp CD-BH10 / Jenson 565 (apparently this one has a two second gap between every track!)
Sony CDP-338ESD - This one is weird... Apparently the person has two of these and one of them doesn't play gapless, but the other one does.
Harman Kardon sound system in a 2019 Subaru & 2 other car cd players (makes unknown) /
An old Phillips cd player from the 1980s (which was a surprise - so occasionally older players had this problem it seems)
Most shocking to me though was the fact that one person says that their Oppo blu ray player doesn't play gapless in cd mode.
NON GAPLESS UNITS (ACCORDING TO EXTERNAL FORUM THREADS RELATING TO THIS VIDEO):
a Samsung all in one player from about 15 years ago / Cambridge Audio One.
An external forum also mentioned blu ray players by Panasonic and Sony not being able to play gapless... and I thought blu - ray players were safe!!!
EDITS TO THIS VIDEO WERE MADE ON THE 31st DECEMBER 2023 (READ BELOW FOR DETAILS):
Some of what I have since found out via the comments regarding certain cd players contradicts what I was told by the companies / shops that I spoke to. This could be because the people I spoke to didn't know what they were talking about / were given the wrong info / or that the players in question have been given firmware updates that they were unaware of when I spoke to them... Who knows! Anyway I removed the section where I talked about not being able to find out about any gapless cd players outside of Cambridge Audio along with saying that they were the best company to go for as I no longer believe that to be the case even if a lot of their stuff is very good.
The most important thing is that there are many cd players out there which you need to avoid if you want smooth gapless playback and many of the posts in the comments section have indeed confirmed this really is a significant issue as I feared even if it's not quite as bad as I thought at the time of recording this video - well I hope so anyway...
I also edited out the bit where I said this problem doesn't happen with blu-ray players in CD mode as it has been mentioned this problem has also affected a couple of those units too (which really sucks)...
I talk about all this and more in part 2.
Thanks again for all your comments... Stay safe.
You scared me. Luckily my Luxman D-10X does gapless playback. I confirmed it twice with Pink Floyd, so deoes my Aurender N20(streamer).
I'm sure I replied to one of your posts but sometimes my comments seem to dissappear or I can't see them. TH-cam comments can be glitchy apparently. Anyway I'm glad your very pricey setup is working fine - I would have been worried too...
this is so great - thank you for the update!
I want to throw a new entry into the ring: I just got the SMSL PL200 delivered this afternoon (it's a goofy little thing, but I can dig it). I didn't have high hopes, but for my first test I discovered it played Slayer's Post Mortem -> Raining Blood transition perfectly gapless (when using it as a transport, haven't had time to test the dac functionality yet). I'm tickled to death - so happily surprised.
So please add SMSL PL200 to the "gapless" list!
ETA: to be fair my older TEAC PD-301 is also gapless. I ended up with that after having two misses with other units, which is when I became aware of the problem. It's ok but very slow and a bit noisy when it spins now, which is why I wanted to replace it. It does have a Burr Brown dac in it, which might appeal to many. It's nice and warm but a bit too muddy for my taste.
Onkyo DX-C390 and C-7030 do support gapless correctly as well as hidden first tracks (another problem with many of these CD players).
Shanling EC Mini does not do gapless or hidden tracks.
Some CDs actually have audio in the gap between tracks, usually applause or crowd noise on live albums - if I recall correctly ELP's Welcome Back My Friends live album does though I don't have the discs around right now. CD players that don't handle gapless correctly will also skip over this audio.
I will indeed add it to the gapless list. Cheers!
If it doesn't play gapless it's not a CD player!!
I'm with you there!
Thanks, you hit the nail on the head.
Unlike @lainmaclennan70, I know that there are CD players that do play with gaps. I’ve owned one, in fact.
Exactly. It's like turntable who stops every track. That would NOT be a turntable.
@@georgeprice4212you misunderstood the comment.
John Darko and other hi-fi reviewers have been complaining about this for years. It's not just CD players, either. Some of the streaming services are not gapless.
Yes, it's taken years for the Play-Fi app (Quad, Arcam players, etc.)to be made gapless...and it finally is, just in the last two weeks!
I don't think gapless playback is a "feature" so much as lack of gapless playback is a fault. I believe it has something to do with using a CD-ROM and a computer to play back the tracks as "files" rather than simply playing the bits as a stream and updating the track and time information as it goes, which was the older (standard) way of playing them back. I'm guessing treating tracks as files and using a computer chip, probably with Linux, is cheaper than the older purpose built CD playback chips. Disclaimer: I'm just shooting from the hip here without doing any research. Someone with more knowledge, please comment about what I got right and what I got wrong here!
If a CD player from any "audiophile" manufacturer (or even from the Goodmans / Alba type brands) was released when CD was mainstream, they would have been totally slated in the press and wouldn't have sold at all.
But rejoice in the fact that you can get "audiophile Ethernet switches" for your streamer system.
You are basically correct. The mechanism is a computer optical drive, they have been for a very long time now. It allows MP3 playback off cd for example.
Those mechanisms have no fault, a cd-rom drive can happily read the CD audio gapless, the fault is what you thought, the software is accessing the tracks like files. To play gapless the software merely needs to read ahead by a few seconds, that's it.
This is completely insane, especially from audio-phile companies - thanks for the warning. Something like this is a deal breaker for me.
Good on you for calling out (current) manufacturers on this - HORRIBLE WORKMANSHIP. Every cheapest crap CD player I had in the 80’s and 90’s did gapless album playback. It’s like they’re trying to force us to abandon physical media and force us into streaming.
Ironically, when your demonstration of the gapped playback started TH-cam inserted an ad.
Oh... When checking my video for a couple of things there was an ad at the start but I didn't realize it was putting them during the video yet. When I reach a certain level I can choose where to place the ads... That's kind of irritating I will have to monitor this. Cheers for letting me know.
I am surprised that any CD player would not be gapless because the tracks are not separate in the redbook standard: the digital stream is continuous (like an LP) and the table of contents merely marks the start and end timecodes for each track. Gapless playback used to an issue only for DAPs because there each track is a separate file and theres metadata to load, frame alignment issues etc. that make gapless playback trickier
I don't understand how this can happen when CDs are gapless by design. This is why I stick with my 20+ year old players which still all work perfectly.
I didn't even know this was a thing. I have only ever owned "gapless" cd players. I include my four discmans, three boom boxes and one Sony deck. It just sounds like the modern "don't give a toss" consumer world we live in.
There has to be some kind of programming issue in the player that's adding the gap. CDs are gapless by design, they are just a PCM audio stream with track markers where songs start/end
Yeah. Something in the firmware is asking the drive to read data between a certain range, then stopping the stream, requesting the next range, and restarting it. It's a daft methodology that should've immediately been obviously _the wrong approach_ to anyone qualified to build a CD player. I had to check that this wasn't posted in April just to believe that something with such a blatantly foolish error actually exists.
Way back, I decided to replace my vintage NEC CD player with an Oppo blueray player. The Oppo is slow to load and also will not play CDs gapless. It seems that all these newer players and transports rely on Embedded Linux operating systems instead of pure hardware logic (application specific integrated circuits) and as such, don't exhibit that instant-on performance. Noobs wouldn't know any different, but older folk who appreciate CDs as a great form of archival likely would. This gapless issue bugged me so much, more than ten years ago, that I went out looking for a higher end Vintage CD player that I keep in my system and it is a true value, with no waiting to load. I paid a fraction of it's original MSRP and the on board DACs are still to this day, pretty darn good. I doubt anyone would be able to hear the difference between it and the Oppo.
So I run an oppo for cd playback as well as hi res files I have on some external drives. I was disappointed when I got it as i thought it didn’t have gapless playback. As it turns out, they added gapless playback in a firmware upgrade and it’s just not obvious how to engage it. When you go to hit play on something, you’ve gotta first hit the option button on the remote and choose gapless play. Not sure that this would even apply to the particular oppo you owned but I thought I’d share.
Just recently (3 or 4 days ago) someone mentioned this in a German forum in a discussion about a new hifi CD player.
Since then I was thinking about this issue a bit, remembering that one of my cheap CD-players that I had when I was a kid also had this issue (bought somewhat in between 2005 and 2010).
And now it just so happened that your video was recommended to me :D
This problem however would also really annoy me, especially when we talk about HiFi equipment - so much, that this would make me not buy it!
That would literally drive me NUTS! Never owned a cd player that didn't play joined tracks properly and sure as heck don't want one!
I ran in to this issue a few years ago, when I needed to replace my old CD-player from the 90's. I almost pulled a trigger on one model (it was probably Cambridge Audio), but read some reviews and someone had pointed out this issue. At first I couldn't even believe it. I'm not quite sure now, but I think I checked back then that the gapless plyback is a part of the Redbook standard for CD's. If my memory serves, the only place that the Redbook defines that there should be a gap is 2-3 second pre-gap with index 0 on the first track (and that should not be normally played).
Back then I just bought a different brand CD-player. Functionally that new one still leaves much to be desired comparing how the old 90's player worked before it broke. The old one was probably the cheapest separate CD-player aavailable when it was bought.
I think this problem is worse for the music than anything that any half way decent cheap DAC can do to the audio quality, so Cambridge Audio and probably others too are wasting their good DAC:s on these players. The albums are not playing the way they were designed to play. Some equipment fanboys may disagree, but they are listening to equipment more than music.
Streaming services are not always an answer even if they have the albums. It seems they have been provided masters that don't play gapless for some records.
Good grief. Imagine if the tracks start instantly but they're split in the wrong place. One song will briefly pause before the very end of it plays (start of the next track), then the next one starts. I have a few albums with the tracks split in the wrong place. It's very annoying.
It's frankly impressive that they've managed to insert gaps at all. A CD is one continuous stream of audio, with a contents table at the start telling the player what ranges of samples belong to what track. All the player has to do when the track changes is increment the number on the screen. It doesn't even have to move the laser and buffer.
Indeed. They've broken the seemingly unbreakable.
A friend of mine bought a Cambridge Topaz cd player a few years ago and he had the same 2 sec gap between tracks,in his cd manual it said the 2 second gap was there to protect the circuits in the player. It annoyed him so much he sold it a few months later.
I would LOVE to hear someone try to come up with a cogent explanation for why, exactly, "the circuits" need a gap for "their protection."
"protect the circuits in the player" ...then it makes you want to throw it out the window.
Emotiva ERC-4 does NOT do gapless playback and I didn't even know it's a thing when I was buying it. It's horrendus experiance. It required having additional transport player tied up with ERC-4 DAC to somehow recover from this nonsense. I immediately reached to Emotiva and got assurance that it will be fixed in their next CD product which is all we can do to stop the gap disaster. From previous and current experiances I've come to conclusion that the problem exists with CD players that have a capability to read CD and DVD discs as if passing from track to track required "rethink" of what type of disc is actually spinning. Maybe it's coincidence, but no CD disc only player that I used was gapless disabled. Thanks for the video!
Cheers.
Interesting video. Thanks Alan. I think it’s also worth mentioning that that any ‘live’ album would also be totally ruined by gaps between songs.
I think the problem with many devices nowadays is that they are built from components instead of being built from scratch. Cambridge has always done this to some extent (they used to just take a perfectly fine CD player from Philips or some such, and replace the audio part by something that audiophiles would pay extra money for) and I wouldn't be surprised if you open that player up, you'll see a CD drive like you would see in a computer, connected to a microcontroller that controls it. In itself that's not a big problem: CD drives can do the same things as CD players can do including non-stop playback. Just tell them to start playing at a certain time code and they'll play happily until they reach the lead-out. But it looks like in this case, the microcontroller just tells it to play track 1 from beginning to end, and when the track is over, it tells the drive to play track 2, etc. So between the tracks, the drive stops playing and waits for the next command, and then it seeks to the beginning of the next track. And there's a good chance that the microcontroller is involved with reading the audio data from the IDA/ATA bus of the CD drive, and send it to the DAC (possibly after processing).
So this is purely a software problem, and a rather stupid one.
An older CD player (from, say, before 2000) will always have a mechanism that's directly connected to the DAC, and is otherwise pretty dumb. The microcontroller in such CD players is not very powerful and controls the mechanism directly unlike modern players. Even if you tell it to play tracks 2, 3, 6, 7, it knows not to stop the playback between 2 and 3 or 6 and 7, only after track 3. You would have to force it to leave a gap by telling it to play only track 2, then only track 3, etc.
There's another problem with modern CD players (and other optical players, even the ones that ARE programmed correctly for gapless playback) which is that almost none of them send P and Q subcodes to the SPDIF output anymore, which means that if you use a DAT or DCC recorder to record a CD digitally, it won't automatically mark the beginning of the tracks on the tape.
I am using a very inexpensive DVD player as a transport to my D/A converter. I still have gaps. I have tried to source a good quality, dedicated CD player that IS GAPLESS. I could not find one. I may try a Blu-ray player as a transport, if that will play gapless; I hear some will play SACD discs also. I love my D/A converter, so that may be the only gapless option. The situation is ridiculous. High-end CD players sound better than they ever have, and they still can't manage to play "Dark Side Of The Moon" without a pause between tracks😢.
Considering how many dance CDs I own, this is a complete shock to me! Still have an old CD player that plays them just fine. I’d be really mad if I bought a player that didn’t play them gapless.
This is a problem with some streaming boxes too. I have a Tascam CDRW900SL CD recorder, a Marantz SA-7001 SACD player, and an old Panasonic DVD-S47 DVD player I use occasionally as a transport and they all offer gapless playback. I also have a Cambridge Azur 851N network streamer and that streams gaplessly too. I am very surprised the Cambridge CD player doesn't offer it.
Thanks for spreading the message. Introducing gaps where there shouldn’t be would totally kill the listening experience.
I already have my CD player, but a test I do every time I decide to upgrade it is to take my copy of Abbey Road and play the medley. If it doesn’t play hapless, then I pass on it.
Indeed... I guess you meant gapless... And if it doesn't play gapless then hapless is not far off as a description...🤠
@@alansteadreviews Sorry, it was a typo 😅
Thank you for your video. As a music lover who listens to classical music, the lack of gapless playback is a huge frustration. It's become a problem not just for new CD players but for practically any contemporary device or app that enables music playback. And beware: for those products that claim to feature gapless, the implementation can be sub-par.
I do remember the guy in Richer Sounds warning me against the Topaz.
Though my Cambridge Audio Azur 651C DOES do gapless playback.
I've been planning on buying a new CD player for the first time in almost a decade, and I NEVER would have considered this possibility.
This was super helpful, and I'll definitely be doing more research into whatever I end up buying.
To alert people like yourself of this debacle is exactly why I did this video. You're right... I wouldn't have even predicted it as an issue until it came up. Thanks for watching
I have an ONN mini stereo that not only puts gaps in between tracks but each track fades in instead of starting at normal volume. Imagine something like "A Hard Days Night" on this thing. Super annoying!
Wow! That's next level annoying! I will add that one to my list for ones to avoid for sure.
this is an absolute deal breaker for me. I'm still using a fairly meh teac only because it supports gapless playback. I don't care if Cambridge is "better" in other ways - I will not touch that! This is not rocket science. I would *really* appreciate an episode that covers the models that *do* support gapless playback (no criticism of you, I get it - you looked and found bupkis). I am looking at the new Shanling models but can't find any info regarding whether they do gapless or not. It's driving me mad.
Because of the good response I have had with this I will no more than a few months time do a follow-up video. I am noting down the new players that people are saying are gapless in the comments and I have discovered one store near me that does a load of audio lab CD players which are apparently gapless. So yes I am definitely thinking that will be a good thing to do.
A lot of people have recommended Denon players too...
I bought a JVC CD player a few years ago that did not do gapless, and I was horrified. Marillion's FEAR was horrible to listen to. I ditched it and got a second hand Marantz instead which is fine. I didn't realise this problem had spread though. My understanding is that gapless playback is part of the original Red book CD standard, so any player that can't do it is defective by definition.
Great video. You made me research this a little further. One explanation I’ve read is that the CD players are coping the tracks in memory. Meaning you’re not hearing the CD off the laser, but the back-up version. This is used as an error buffer. Which makes sense in a car (with bumps and shocks) but not so useful for a Hi-Fi component.
If I was to speculate - Perhaps with production of optical drives decreasing, these companies are using chips from the automobile industry? Cars were a long time hold out for CDs so they’d be plenty of chips out there.
One other thing regarding the 2009 Abbey Road CD: there’s multimedia content on that disc (short doco) that may be tricking the CD player in your car to think it’s a data disc.
Not exactly. Because the format of audio on a CD was never a literally continuous stream like a vinyl record or cassette, it has always required at least a very small buffer. Anti-skip came along when memory got cheaper, and that buffer grew much, much longer to allow the transport to "catch up" if it lost track.
So, even if your guess is correct, and some player copies tracks into memory, in full, one at a time... there's still no excuse for this. The memory buffer would have to be sufficient to store an entire CD's worth of audio, in the worst case that a disc was actually just one long track. (And apparently, that's supposed to be what we do now, if you ask the shops close to our host.) If it's big enough to accomplish this -- which isn't much to ask nowadays, with 1GB of memory being kind of at the lower end of what you can buy from commodity IC vendors anyway -- then there's no reason it couldn't just buffer the next track too, or the whole disc, or at least the next 30 seconds whether it's part of the same track or not.
Enforcing hard cutoffs at track boundaries has no technical purpose. It was just a poor decision by the software engineer, that somehow didn't raise alarm bells by anyone else at a company that pretends to care enough about audio to manufacture appliances for playing it.
Everything I've read said the Yamaha CD-S303 is NOT gapless. I bought one about two months ago and immediately applied the firmware update, and I can that at least my machine plays gapless CDs flawlessly. I don't know if it didn't prior to the firmware update because I hadn't played any before then, but I know it works now.
I bought the same player a month ago.During that time i was just listening to CDs with 2 sec gaps,i hadn't played a seamless CD.Soon as i watch this video i went and played DSOTM and Sgt Pepper and they both played fine,thankfully.
I faced this issue a few years ago when searching for a new mini system as the one I had at the time had this extremely annoying problem. I did eventually manage to find a system from Panasonic that had all the features I wanted and played gapless CD albums properly but boy, what a rabbit hole to find one. It became quite apparent to me at the time that the salespeople didn't have a clue what I was talking about and came up with some pretty lame ideas about overcoming the limitations of players that wouldn't play gapless. My response to them was always the same: "Under the terms of the Sale of Goods Act, an item must be fit for its intended purpose" and then I would leave the store. I also have a little cheap portable basic from Sony that also plays gapless. It is a ludicrous situation when a £30 system can do what a £300 system can't.
I listen to Jean michelle Jarre. If the next machine cannot play them, it's going right back !
I really don't like a CD player that cannot play gapless recordings. It's a bad design choice!
Interesting stuff, I didn’t know of this problem. While my older equipment still works well, with dwindling options for music collectors, if I ever needed a replacement cd player I would now opt for a good Blu-ray player, but rather than rely it’s built in DA converter, use separate DA box to do the decoding to analogue (this should give a consistent output no matter what optical transport you use). Yes it does mean adding an extra box, but this has the advantage as most Blu-ray will also play HD audio, DVD-A and SACD too. The quality but affordable hifi hay-day is unfortunately over.
I suspect the gap issue is down to the same chips being used in all these products. It’s important to note that most hifi products will have an array of components made by other manufacturers, not everything under the hood will be made by the brand you buy.
I completely agree, and will also point out how the modern players that will also play SACDs and DVD-Audios are screwing up and cannot properly handle the surround channels, even though the original discs are encoded correctly. I heard about this at the Life In Surround youtube channel. Thanks.
Another reason why it's better getting an old DVD player with a digital audio out and plug it into external DAC. Decent CD players from 90s in good working condition are getting harder to find. Modern stuff is either crappy or too expensive.
This "problem" is the reason I've went back to CDs. Thankfully my hardware performs as expected, but this is infuriating. No streaming service offers these albums as intended. My Denon receiver plays .flac files in a playlist gapless. Thanks for highlighting something to look out for.
By the way Amazon music HD does play gapless. I have it on my phone and I always download it via the app onto my phone first so that I'm not technically streaming it and get (in theory) full quality playback. I would have gone for Spotify but to my knowledge they don't yet do full quality even though their MP3 quality is meant to be a lot better than it used to be... Not saying it's the best but it's what I use. My friend uses apple music which I had for a while and also plays gapless and in HD (I think)...
Unbelievable this is an issue in 2023. It's also unacceptable with portable audio like Sandisk Clip etc in this day and age.
I have the Cambridge Audio CXC Transport and it supports gapless playback. A CD transport requires an external DAC for playback. There aren't any Line Out connections only digital ones. I use a Schiit Audio Bifrost 2/64 DAC.
Just because they're a transport doesn't necessarily mean that they support gapless automatically. Gapless playback is related to the processing software inside the CD player or transport that actually transport that information from the reading laser and feed it outward. If that chip is not set up or programmed to support gapless it doesn't matter what DAC you run it into it will not be gapless. Thanks and have a good day
The gap in the audio is a result of the mute circuit of the CD player. To prevent unwanted noise prior to the music playback the software in the CD player automatically mutes the output from the DAC (digital to analogue converter). The CD format is defined in the Philips Red Book standard. The data on the CD contains sub-codes. P sub‑code contains information about where the music starts and ends, and the Q sub‑code contains absolute and relative time information. The software in the bad CD player is incorrectly responding to the P sub-codes. The good CD player probably ignores the P sub-codes and only uses the Q sub-codes. This is a software problem that the manufacturer of the CD player should have addressed.
The CD player software might also mute the DAC when the data is all zeros.
Ah. Cheers for that info!
The Cambridge Audio Topaz CD10 uses a Wolfson Microelectronics WM8725 DAC chip. The mute function is controlled via pin 10 of the chip. This input line of the chip has an internal pull-down and normally the audio output is enabled. A line from the microcontroller drives Pin 10 high when the software wishes to mute the audio output. So, you could isolate Pin 10 of the chip and thereby permanently inhibit the mute function. @@alansteadreviews
Nice video; I first discovered this problem many years ago but not with CDs. I discovered that almost all software players would not play gapless. Also, as an opera listener, this is much more noticeable. All opera CDs are split into tracks for convenience and to comply with operatic convention so that arias are selectable. A gap in an opera sounds terrible.
Most newer software has been updated to be gapless and there are CD players that can do likewise. I guess that many CD purchasers have a collection that does not really matter.
I have a Denon dcd-800ne, which is not an old model, it luckily plays all my cds gapless. I wouldn't be able to live with a cd player that didn't do gapless playback. Kinda weird that this is suddenly a thing, i haven't heard a single player since the 80s that didn't easily handle gapless playback.
Denon from what I have heard on the comments seems to be a reliable brand.
I didn't even think about this issue and automatically assumed that all CD players have gapless playback. Fortunately, even my new cheap portable CD player has gapless playback. Thanks!
Liked! Subscribed! First I've heard of this on a CD player, and I'm shocked! Non-gapless playback is an issue on streaming services, and I wonder why they can't get that right either.
Lack of love for the product. Some players can’t even play a track seamless. Just buy a player from the old days.
I've used a lot of CD players in my life but I've never come across one that doesn't do gapless playback. I'm not as surprised to see this as I should be, though. Physical media isn't being taken as seriously by manufacturers as it used to be.
Incredible. Thanks for bringing this to my attention 🙏
Cheers
Roxel RCD 400 inserts gaps, I queried with the manufacturer last year to see if there was a firmware upgrade to sort it but unfortunately not, that's what its supposed to do! I posted a warning review on amazon at the time. I ended up buying a secondhand old player instead.
I will add it to my list. Cheers
I have a newer (one year old) DENON DCD-600NE cd player that plays without gaps. I have listened to quite a few live recordings that have played seamlessly. So you can add this Denon to your gapless list. Strange thing is, I seem to recall reading online somewhere shortly after I bought it, that this unit inserted gaps between the tracks, but it definitely does not.
I will indeed add it to my list. 👍
That’s what put me off buying a Cambridge Audio CD player the not knowing if it supports gapless playback or not, luckily my marantz does
why not just ask them?
Gapless playback has been very important to me as both a listener and creator. For the latter, this was why I invested in a DAW made for mastering (Steinberg WaveLab) to ensure that the CDs of my own music will be the way I wanted to them be: index markers at the right spot and gapless playback. This is also why I like listening to complete album videos or downloads as they ensure continuous playback.
You bring up a good point. On the production side of things, the mastering engineer and artist(s) specifically sequenced the album and timed out the pauses between music. To add to this timing is disingenuous to the music. Never mind orchestral, choral, chamber, ambient and other genres which will be interrupted by the gap more often than not.
That's quite ridiculous. Do they even listen to their product?
We need a list of gapless vs not gapless (Crap) CD players. And very simply, we consumers should only buy the gapless players.
This will force the non-gapless manufacturers to get their act together and care a bit about basic fundamental playback features. And offer gapless players again.
Amazing how it's 2023 and there are actually issues with something as simple as a CD player. Or is this just their way of making you purchase their streamers? - lol. 😮😮😮
Absolutely. As for my part, I'm putting together a list of cd players recommended in the comments and will visit some other shops so at some point I can include them in a follow up video. There are plenty out there it seems from the comments which is encouraging, but also unfortunately there are plenty of non gapless ones too...
@@alansteadreviews Thank you. That's a good idea. This video makes me want to go around the house and test all of my players, but most of them were made in the late '80s and '90s so I don't expect any issues.
I've also procured a bunch of DVD players that I use strictly for CD players. They have very good audio quality, but I'll need to test them too with the right type of CD with songs that flow right into the next ones, like a medley. I saw the ones you mentioned. Good. I know one or two of my Elton John CDs have this. I think "The Fox" CD may have it. And "Good Bye Yellow Brick Road" where "Funeral For a Friend" segues into "Love Lies Bleeding'. I'm almost positive they go right into each other.
I found this out to my chagrin after mastering my independent prog rock album that I spent thousands making, in a gapless format.
After testing the cd in cars I would find that 1 in 10 car stereos would add gaps to what should have been gapless transitions.
Even more horrifying is that, I found many of the wav/mp3/flac computer players also did not support gapless play.
Being a ludite, I still use itunes (which does support gapless) and would never have thought manufacturers/programmers/creaters of cd players/wav players etc would overlook this issue.
This is ridiculous, we are going backwards 😡
Indeed
I did some digging about this & looks like you are right-- a significant number of players insert a gap between tracks. I've never had a player with the issue. I had an Oppo & now have a Cambridge universal player. I also have a Pro-ject RS CD transport (circa 2019). It's been suggested that some transports use mechanisms designed for computer drives that can't avoid a break between tracks. Many of Pro-ject's players use a new mechanism made by another Austrian company. Cambridge is only showing one current CD player (the AXC 35), which does do gapless playback.
My axc25 does does gapless playback too, and I was under the impression that there are other players did too. I may have to confirm this at some point.
As someone who has more computer optical drives than is reasonable, rational, or defensible ... The fact that they are computer drives is not the reason. The fact that they are driven by incompetent software is absolutely the reason.
Computer drives see audio CDs the way the see any other CD... a collection of sectors. Whether those sectors contain audio or any other form of data is pretty much irrelevant.
Some firmware of early, early drives (like circa 1992, give or take a few years) didn't have a command to tell them to read audio sectors and return the raw data to the host computer, so the only thing you could do is tell the drive itself to read the data and output analog audio from the front-panel headphone jack, and the rear-panel audio output (which connected to the sound card, or a pass-through to RCA jacks.) This changed a few years later, and the process of reading audio sectors as data (and returning that data to the computer, instead of playing it in the drive) became known as "ripping" or "digital audio extraction." It took a little while, but this became the de-facto way of playing audio from CDs, and by the late Windows XP era, practically no CD Player software was still asking the drive to do the playback. It was all handled as a stream of data, managed by the OS audio stack, and output from the soundcard the same way it would've from a WAV file or MP3.
This became SO ubiquitous, that drives stopped shipping with any front-panel audio controls, headphones jacks, or volume knobs. Just a tray, an eject button, and an activity LED. Not long after that, the audio output on the back disappeared, too. The ONLY way to get audio out of those drives was digitally, through the ribbon / SATA cable.
So if you were to buy a brand-new optical drive today, it probably wouldn't have an analog audio interface of any kind. Just a power and host data connector. You would be expected to ask for audio sectors as data, and then what you do with them is up to you.
I.e., the solution to a gap between tracks is.... to not stop and restart the digital audio output between tracks. Just treat the DAC output like a stream, and keep shoveling data into it. There is NO reason for a gap, because the passing of data between the disc and the audio outputs is asynchronous in so many places already, that the design by definition has to manage the flow to ensure it's always enough, and never too much. The drive doesn't care about tracks -- it never did. The very concept only exists for our convenience. It's just metadata, tucked in alongside the audio data on the disc. To the drive, it's just one big long pool of sectors, the meaning of which is completely unimportant.
I have a current CD player - Rotel CD Tribute, which plays without gaps.
I listen (mostly) to classical music. There are numerous instances where tracks should run continuously, even though they are indexed separately. But one piece that even many pop/rock enthusiasts may have in their collections is Beethoven's 5th Symphony. The last two movements run together. Beethoven's 6th Symphony has *three* movements that run continuously. I'm not currently in the market for a player, but I'm astonished that gapless playback -- which we've had since the invention of the CD -- is now unavailable in new players.
Yes, the Pastoral is a big problem on systems that won't play gapless. I have one classical CD that has 23 tracks on it that are all gapless and 3 extra tracks that are not. Luckily my current Panasonic system - that took me almost a year to find - plays them properly.
I guess the problem is that these are not CD players in classical sense but instead little computers (microcontrollers) which "rip" the data from the disc one track at a time.
Don't know what's going on here as all the cd players that I have tried recently are all gapless, so I don't know who you were talking to. Cambridge Audio Topaz is a strange one and is old. The new transports from Cambridge is gapless.
It seems Cambridge Audio has sorted the issue now. No luck with all the other cd players I found out about though but I'm sure there must be some more out there... One would hope
The fact that a finished product like this exists in the world is just embarrassing. We are truly living in a post-HiFi world. These things are a shallow mockery of the equipment they are designed to resemble.
I’m surprised at the Cambridge! I have the CXC CD Transport, a current model which definitely does play gaplessly. That would drive me mad as apart from DSOTM etc, I have many live albums. I knew this could be an issue with streaming but didn’t realise it affected CDs.
Yes indeed, many new CD players won't play gaplessly - yet I see people around the web gaslighting us that you aren't telling the truth. I have one of the Tangent pieces of junk that inserts a gap between 'tracks' where a seemless piece of music is intended. Every bought classical symphony album is affected, also albums by Pink Floyd, JMJ, etc - all now glitchy.
Yes I read on a forum someone saying I was insane and that this doesn't happen... despite my video demonstration of it happening... 🤔
I remember when iTunes first came out and having ripped all my CDs (hundreds of them) discovered that it played gaps between tracks which infuriated me. I also discovered around the same time that Toast put gaps between tracks (2.0 seconds, I think) by default so had to remove all the gaps manually before burning. The 2.0 second gap before the first track, whatever purpose that served, could not be removed for some reason.
I can't remember exactly when iTunes went 'gapless' was phased out but it was clearly due to user demand. This seems to be an incredibly retrograde move. One can only hope that it was an oversight rather than a deliberate decision.
It's why I didn't bother with an iPod back in the day. I still don't own one I just skipped straight just to streaming. I use iTunes though and put everything as wav.
The 2 second intro is a CD standard, but can be reduced down to zero (except for the first track, which players don't play). In theory, lossless audio should not have gaps, so not require "gapless" playback.
The manufactors can save 5 cents by removing the buffer memory needed to do seamless.
CDs are already digital. When you rip them to your PC, you’re moving from one medium to another, you aren’t digitising them. This is responding to your remark about digitising your CDs.
Truly spoken I phrased it in a very untechnical way
Ripping is the technically correct term. By the way, use software that has secure ripping, ensuring the audio is correctly transferred. EAC, db PowerAmp, and MusicBee are some options.
I was totally unaware of this problem effecting modern CD Players. The only time I've encountered this problem was with early versions of the iTunes software. My Arcam alpha 9 is gapless thankfully. Its 25 years old and still works flawlessly. I will keep this in mind though, come the time when I need to upgrade thanks.
The new generation of engineers were raised on .mp3 files. The different mindset is bleeding over.
That's my guess, anyway.
You make a good point
Ive seen this before & it drives me nuts. I have noticed it streaming far more frequently than with cd players. In some cases its a software issue. In other instances it’s hardware based. I don’t know why it has to be so complicated.
Indeed
I had a midlevel Kenwood portable CD in the early '90s that did this, and I didn't even realize it. Right before the end of a track, the display would switch from elapsed time, to a :03, :02, :01 countdown, and the next track would begin playing flawlessly. It had an early anti-skip, so this must have been the buffer being displayed while it played ahead.
Some albums have tracks concealed within the countdowns on players that show them, otherwise they simply appear at the end of the track that you are playing. It's a shame my AXC25 doesn't show the countdown... Another cutback no doubt.
The "negative time" counter was a normal condition called the pre-track gap.
The table of contents (TOC) on a CD has index markers for every track, that technically begin at Index 0. This is the time code marker that defines the beginning of a track's pre-track gap. The original CD specification called for a 2-second gap between tracks, so you would see -- 00:01, -- 00:00, then the actual track would begin, at a position indicated in the TOC as Index 1 (what the track time readout would display as 00:00).
The disc author could elect to add additional index markers (2 through 99) to break the track into further seekable segments, but very few consumer-oriented CD players ever exposed the indexes within a track on the display, or had any buttons to navigate them. Regardless Index 0 and Index 1 are a mandatory component of the TOC for every track.
It didn't take long before authors realized that 1) the gap between tracks is really just a time code detail, and is otherwise still exactly the same as every other block of data (or, "sector") on a CD audio disc -- ergo, there's no reason it _has to_ be silent. In other words, you can stick audio in there during the countdown between tracks. 2) Also, the whole mandatory 2-second gap thing is just dumb, and there's no good reason for it. Moreover, CD players didn't seem to mind at all if you left it out, and authored the disc with Index 0 and Index 1 pointing to the exact same time code.
With those two realizations, we could have audio than ran continuously between tracks -- particularly relevant for live albums, but also popular with concept albums. As the CD format carried on, it became commonplace for tracks to have any length of gap between them, from none at all, to having entire songs hidden in the negative-space between tracks.
It's actually easier for a player to read audio sectors without any concern or even awareness whatsoever for their position in a track. The processor that handles things like the display and features like repeat and program and random-play modes can pipe up if we should do anything other than just read the next sector after this one, and so on, until we reach the end of the disc or somebody presses Stop. Anti-skip buffers don't really change that. They just insert a longer time delay between when the data is read, and when it is played by the DAC. ALL audio CD players have a buffer -- ever since the first CD player ever made. They have to, because the audio isn't actually a continuous stream on the disc. It's encoded and shuffled around a bit to make it easier to track, and to prevent minor optical imperfections from making the data unreadable. Anti-skip was just a clever extension that added significantly more buffer memory. The other component -- a variable-speed transport -- was already there, too. Discs spin at a different rate when reading the inside circumference than the outside circumference, so they tweaked the spindle controller to allow it to read a little bit faster when it needed to fill, or refill, the buffer. It's possible anti-skip would've been there on day one, if memory had been cheaper in the 80s. But, several seconds of 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo audio takes quite a bit of memory, and that would've been prohibitively expensive before the early 90s.
Sharp's CD-BH10 shelf system adds a gap between songs (but the CD-BH20 is gapless). There is NOTHING in the product descriptions to give you a heads-up. Ugh.
I will add this to the list. Cheers. Yeah. It seems there is rarely any warning in the product descriptions of these affected players...
I cant believe this. I used to copy cds and had to make sure it had no gap and burn app did not add app. I assumed that all cd players should play it as made, this is crazy, why would they go against how cd is designed to be played.
My thoughts exactly when I found out...
It’s great that you made this video and articulated this problem. This has been driving me crazy as well. It is extraordinary that the actual spec for a CD drive would not contain an insistence on gapless playback. It makes no sense to have anything other than that. I also have a cheap portable that plays gapless. Just bought a Sharp micro audio system that does not have it. I bought a Buick Enclave in 2017 when CD players were being phased out so they could hook people on satellite radio. The Buick has a CD player and that’s why I chose it over anything else in the lot. I was horrified to find that it does not play back gapless. I record a lot of my own music direct to a Tascam CD recorder and often the tracks run into each other. Without gapless it pauses for a second between each track. Ridiculous. The licensing of CD spec hardware should absolutely not lower the level of quality in playback. The Tascam CD recorders are excellent, robust machines that playback perfectly and also record as easily as a cassette deck. I was surprised to see an actual hi-if deck used as an example that was not gapless. I’m convinced at this point that the biggest players in tech are deliberately sabotaging the quality levels to intentionally create more anxiety and anger. There was a time when audio and computer technology was extremely competitive and strived every year to make things better and to offer more features. That’s completely gone. Now computers, phones and tablets have many little problems that are both software and hardware related and while some are addressed in updates, many never are. Audio gear is going the same way. It’s a real travesty. I recently rediscovered the cassette. Got my old 3 head JVC repaired and was blown away by the beauty of that technology and the machine. So much mechanical ingenuity and excellence. Even in the cassette itself. Today they are introducing some new cassette machines and they are all stripped of features and are reportedly very cheap. It’s really sad to see this.
Cheers
Just a technical note about the MP3 comment:
Yes, MP3 as a format has a problem with gapless playback. The audio is stored in frames, and there's no granularity less than that. So if the original audio doesn't happen to be a length multiple of MP3 frames, then the last few samples will be contained in a frame that will be decoded in full, with a smidge of additional silence at the end.
There is a solution to this, and it's pretty well supported: Add a header that defines the original source length, in samples, so the decoder can process exactly that many, and discard whatever remains at the tail end. The MP3 format is just a long train of frames stuck end-to-end, and each frame begins with a synchronization pattern that you can detect and begin acting upon. If the decoder gets to the end of a frame, and the next few bytes don't contain a sync pattern, it just keeps scanning until it finds one. The side-effect of this is, you can insert any kind of arbitrary data you want before or between or after valid frames -- and so we have. ID3, Xing, LAME... all tags of non-MP3 data just tacked on to one end or the other of the stream. And as long as the tag is kept intact, and the audio frames aren't edited without updating the tag, then we can add non-native features like gapless playback and accurate seeking.
Cheers for the info
I've not heard anything about frames before regarding the MP3 format. What I can say is that MP3 a lossy codec, not encoding all of the available fidelity, so to speak. Instead of MP3, use the FLAC format or Apple Lossless. These are both data compressed for small file size but the audio is lossless so you get back the same fidelity that was on the CD or WAV file, etc. upon decoding at playback.
I prefer FLAC files, but iOS doesn't support them natively. There are apps that support FLAC playback, though.
Also a problem, some newer CDs put gaps between tracks that shouldn't be there. I bought a standup act by Jim Gaffigan and there were gaps between bits, and it wasn't the CD player. It made listening to it unbearable.
That's really annoying
Emotiva's newest CD player can not play gapless. It's very disappointing.
NONE?!!!! (In response to your short list of CD players that have gapless capability) That is CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!! The only stereo I EVER experienced without gapless was my first one, which was a JVC boom box from like '91. All my Sony discmen I purchased (and I purchased A LOT) they all were gapless. Then I went to iPod so I remember briefly Apple had to add a toggle for gapless tracks but it was relatively early in the iPod age. So why on Earth are these companies dropping the gapless thing. PS - F*_K streaming!!! I agree with you, vinyl is great and stuff but seriously CD will give the best quality, convenient, and rippable. BRING BACK SACD!!!!
It turns out as per the comments I have been receiving that there are quite a few gapless ones out there so not as bad as I thought. I just had some bad luck with the places I rang I guess. There were also quite a few non gapless ones too though. I am noting them all down and will do a follow-up video covering them and other things. In the meantime I may pin a comment of my own listing them on this video comments section...
TASCAM CD-RW900MKII (CD-recorder) circa 2015 supports gapless playback, so does 1998 Marantz CD-67SE
I have an old Yamaha CDR-HD1500 which plays cd and you can rip them to hard disk and that plays the Dark side of the moon with gapless playback no problem. I didn't realise that this was an issue on new players. I guess I will be keeping this player as long as I can. Interesting content I have subscribed.
Cheers
I think this has to do with them being more CD-ROM drives with audio controls rather than an actual CD player.
I read a conversation about this on Reddit I think. Old CDROM drive manufacturers building them now...
@@alansteadreviews Very interesting! Makes sense.
I bought a Cambridge Audio AXR100D Receiver/Amplifier last week, and this had a defect of another kind that would annoy CD lovers, amongst others. When you play an album / single on either CD or a digital audio player, connected to the AXR using digital cables (either optical or coaxial), the first few split seconds are missing from the first track on the album or single. Not noticeable if the particular track starts quietly, but if it kicks in with a beat, guitar, vocal, etc. you miss the first split seconds of the track and hear an audible click. In particular, it can make shuffling digital singles quite excruciating. Cambridge Audio sent me a replacement unit, and exactly the same fault was present. They said they have no other reports of this defect, but I think it's present in every unit and casual users just haven't noticed it. So another example of they not having attention to detail or testing their products extensively enough. I'm returning for a refund and getting a Denon AVR-X2800 instead.
That's really weird and annoying. Another layer to this problem. I'm hearing good things about Denon via the comments. Good luck with it...
I bought an AXR100D a few weeks ago and it does exactly the same thing. It also does it if I stream to it over bluetooth.
Great video. I recently read about a recent Arcam model with this issue. Apparently Arcam released a firmware update to fix it. CD players shouldn’t need firmware updates. It has one job and that’s to play CDs, over complicated computer derived tech is mostly junk IMO.
Gap less playback is obviously becoming a common problem across the board. Sadly today’s CD players are just junk compared to the machines from the 90s.
Live concert CDs are a good testing tool for CD players.
Hi Alan, you definitely got my attention with this video. I’ve had an Audiolab 6000CDT CD transport for the last 3 years, and I haven’t experienced that problem. I have a couple of older players that also don’t have issues with playback. Keep up the good work! 👍
Cheers. I'm really pleased with the response so far...
Gapless is a technical issue that appeared since streaming era. I never heard of a gapless issue with cd players. All my cd played tracks seamlessly. So happy as a first owner of a build like a tank denon dcd 3000 from 1996 that still plays superb
Why the hell would a cd player be designed to not have gapless. I never even considered that this would be an issue.
There was a discussion on Audiokarma about this topic a few days ago. I think he was referring to a Yamaha player. I replied that the Yamaha CD-S303 I recently purchased was gapless. I also have a 34 Technics player that is superb.
We had one in our household back in 1991. I remember noticing it when playing MCMXC a.D. by Enigma which is a segued album. So it is not a new problem. Can't be sure of the brand, I think it was a Technics.
If you have a CD player that inserts gaps, then try using an external DAC (connected to the RCA Coaxial or TOSLink digital output). This digital output is taken prior to the CD player’s on-board DAC and will bypass the problematic software mute. The external DAC will have its own soft-mute, but generally this only activates at power-up, or for a data receive or clock lock error.
Interesting. I will research this further
Based on people on forums and on here saying that the Marantz CD5005 (2014) and CD6007 (2020) are gapless, I've just bought a CD6004 (2011) with recently cleaned lens and recently lubricated tray mechanism, as that was what I could afford. I hope it's also gapless, and will be seeing (hearing?) if it is as soon as it arrives.
(EDIT 6 days later) to my relief, yes my CD6004 does play gapless! The short is on my channel.
Hope it works out for you. 🤞
@@alansteadreviews thanks, 🤞🏻 indeed.
I've never seen a CD player, DVD player, or Blu-Ray player that did not offer gapless playback of CD's, and I say that as a professional audio technician who has serviced audio gear since 1977. Even my first CD player, a Yamaha purchased in 1985, had gapless playback. Any new CD player found to be incapable of gapless playback should be RMA'd back to the manufacturer as defective, or simply returned to the dealer for a refund.
BTW, I featured a link to this video on my Community page. Hopefully, this will drive a few viewers your way.
Cheers mate!
Please take a look at my latest comment about my two Sony CDP-338ESD CD Players.
That’s horrible. All cd players used to be gapless. What’s even worse in this age of streaming is that the gap is often baked in in the tracks. I first encountered it when I bought a download of an opera-there was fade at the beginning and end of all tracks. This was many years ago, but those gaps are still there in many operas on streaming services 🤬
The Cayin mini-CDMKII plays gapless. And thanks for the warning!
Cheers. I will add that one to my list...
I haven't listened to any of my CDs in several years. I cannot remember if they would play gapless or not. I used Pioneer in my car and at home. I still have the home one, since I bought it in '99. I will have to go check it.
I remember back in the 90's a DJ on the radio was complaining their professional (expensive) CD players could do anything like pitch control, repeat short selections, play in reverse etcetera but could NOT play gapless. Sounds to me like it has to do with buffering the track in memory.
Interesting, I've been listening to cd's for like 40 years, and over those many years on various cd players and have never experienced non-gapless playback. Maybe I'm just lucky.
I hope you stay lucky. It's a really annoying problem. Like I say in the video always double check.
You're not just lucky. This is very much a 2023 kind of problem.
Companies designing audio products up until recently weren't creating products for hipsters to use as decorations and statement pieces. (Well, maybe B&O were...) They were designed to be functional.