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CD-transport of good quality

per flemming

Registered User
Is there such thing as a good and reliable dedicated CD-transport nowadays.?
Budget restricted to below €1500 or thereabouts, due to being used in secondary setup with a Chord dac

I have currently a Cambridge CXC, great value and probably supported.
However bettered soundwise even by a Rega cd player used as transport only.



Any recommendations are welcomed, thanks
 
I had my CXC modded by upgrading the master clock and the Spdif interface.

Its sound quality, feeding the same Mytek Brooklyn DAC, is now clearly better IMO.
 
Lower jitter is always a good thing with SPDIF, I think the upgrade suggestion is a good one, unless you want to splash out on a PS Audio Perfectwave transport.

Anubisgrau (Gordan) a man I have never met but get the feeling he has very good ears, is using a Shigaclone build, professionally built, which interests me too.
 
Arcam CD180 CD-T if you use also an MDAC.
With this combo the Arcam CD-T get the optical clock signal from the MDAC
 
Audio Note CDT-Zero is good (classic 'what I've got' sorry). Neat and reliable, and a definite improvement over the Cambridge 840C used previously, itself a good transport.
 
You shoukd be able to pick up an ex dem Moon 260DT for your budget.

I use a Moon 260D CD transport and it is really good. I use it connected to a Chord DAC64 mkII.

I chose mine after lengthy comparison with the CXC and if you can afford either there really is no choice - a totally blind friend came into he shop during the demo not knowing what we were comparing and immediately heard the superiority of the Moon :)
 
I use a Moon 260D CD transport and it is really good. I use it connected to a Chord DAC64 mkII.

I chose mine after lengthy comparison with the CXC and if you can afford either there really is no choice - a totally blind friend came into he shop during the demo not knowing what we were comparing and immediately heard the superiority of the Moon :)

Is a 260D an older version of the 260DT ?
 
A friend of mine who is the owner of a Hifi shop in Portugal currently has a second hand GamuT CD3 for sale. It's priced within your budget. No idea how good it is as a transport.
 
Bizarre, you’d struggle to find a better Transport without having to spend silly money.

Maybe the problem was the DAC you were using, the power cable used or the digital cable?
 
Is there such thing as a good and reliable dedicated CD-transport nowadays.?
Budget restricted to below €1500 or thereabouts, due to being used in secondary setup with a Chord dac

I have currently a Cambridge CXC, great value and probably supported.
However bettered soundwise even by a Rega cd player used as transport only.



Any recommendations are welcomed, thanks

Second-hand/ex-demo deals not withstanding, I really like the top-loading Project Box RS.

Even with the upgraded PSU it should still be there or thereabouts with regard to your budget. I've heard this several times, never been less than taken with it. If my budget didn't allow CEC, it's what I'd buy for myself.

http://decoaudio.com/deco_audio_cd_transports.html
 
I know what a CD player is -obviously - but what is a CD transport?
“A CD transport concentrates on reading the information held on a compact disc without expending effort in turning that digital signal into an analogue output, unlike a CD player.“
 
There has to be some synergy between the transport SPDIF and the DAC. I suspect that there is an optimum SPDIF amplitude and bandwidth for any DAC and they won't all be the same.
 
Second-hand/ex-demo deals not withstanding, I really like the top-loading Project Box RS.

Even with the upgraded PSU it should still be there or thereabouts with regard to your budget. I've heard this several times, never been less than taken with it. If my budget didn't allow CEC, it's what I'd buy for myself.

http://decoaudio.com/deco_audio_cd_transports.html

I've been using one of these Project transports for a couple of years and very good they are. I was lucky enough to pick up a second hand Project power supply and it made a positive improvement.
 
I asked Pioneer, as I was using a TASCAM CD-200 as a transport (it has a £40 CD drive unit), and why their £3,000 Esoteric transport should be any better. Their reply is below.

My reading is that the transport is irrelevant to sound quality, certainly relative to jitter issues in the DAC, and that even jitter from the DAC may be inaudible. I once tested 4 hi-end DACs side by side and could not tell the difference.



Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for your email, your enquiry has been registered in our system
under reference number:
Pioneer ticket ref nr: 25xxx

Hello Mr xxx, difference will be the durability of the mechanism and a
reduction of jitter, which in turn helps your DAC achieve a greater audio
conversion accuracy. To a certain level jitter is not an issue when
extracting data
(computer files and the like), but when a real time DA
conversion is done to the data stream, jitter becomes very important
and
can create minute timing issues in the DA conversion. Whether it would be
actually audible is another thing altogether
. Audio is a very subjective.
Regards

Please note that it is not possible to reply to this message. Should you
wish to reply, then please contact us at:
https://contactcenter.pioneer.eu/contactus.nsf/contact?openform&sub=pgb&lang=en
ensuring that you fill in the reference number, which will allow us to
respond more efficiently.


Kind regards

Pioneer Europe NV (UK Branch)
Customer Relations Department

http://www.pioneer.co.uk
http://contactcenter.pioneer.eu/contactus.nsf/contact?openform&sub=pgb&lang=en

Tel - 0330 123 1240 or 0870 600 1539

I have owned several TEAC and TASCAM products.

I currently uses a TASCAM CD200 that uses the CD-5020A drive unit. I feed
the digital output into a high quality external DAC.

Is there any reason why the digital data stream from a VDRS transport (as
used in Esoteric) should be any better than from the CD-5020A transport?
Surely both provide perfectly accurate digital data streams?

Kind regards
 


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