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 KZfaq 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.

If it doesn't play gapless it's not a CD player!!

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 KZfaq inserted an ad.

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!

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 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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I really don't like a CD player that cannot play gapless recordings. It's a bad design choice!

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.

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.

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.

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 listen to Jean michelle Jarre. If the next machine cannot play them, it's going right back !

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!

Thanks for spreading the message. Introducing gaps where there shouldn’t be would totally kill the listening experience.

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.

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.

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.

This is ridiculous, we are going backwards 😡

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 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!

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.

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.

I do remember the guy in Richer Sounds warning me against the Topaz. Though my Cambridge Audio Azur 651C DOES do gapless playback.

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.

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.

Incredible. Thanks for bringing this to my attention 🙏

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.

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😢.

Unbelievable this is an issue in 2023. It's also unacceptable with portable audio like Sandisk Clip etc in this day and age.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lack of love for the product. Some players can’t even play a track seamless. Just buy a player from the old days.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

The Cayin mini-CDMKII plays gapless. And thanks for the warning!

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.

That's quite ridiculous. Do they even listen to their product?

Instant return not fit for purpose

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.

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!

Live concert CDs are a good testing tool for CD players.

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.

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.

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.

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. 😮😮😮

The new generation of engineers were raised on .mp3 files. The different mindset is bleeding over. That's my guess, anyway.

The manufactors can save 5 cents by removing the buffer memory needed to do seamless.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I have a current CD player - Rotel CD Tribute, which plays without gaps.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

Emotiva's newest CD player can not play gapless. It's very disappointing.

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 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.

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.

TASCAM CD-RW900MKII (CD-recorder) circa 2015 supports gapless playback, so does 1998 Marantz CD-67SE

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! 👍

The Marantz CD6007 plays gapless 👍

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve never encountered this, but it’s absurd that any manufacturer would find a design flaw like this acceptable. My most recent cd player purchase was about 2 years ago and I’m happy to say this hasn’t been an issue.

Here’s an idea let’s create a list of CD players that don’t mute and add unnecessary gaps! Pro-Ject Audio Systems

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.

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!!!!

I've got hundreds of Operas in CD, there's no gap between tracks, usually... it would be awful with gaps ! 😱