earlofsodbury
Wastrel.
I own and play a lot of CDs - I'm old and ossified and enjoy the 'album' format, the solid media, and grew disenchanted with downloads and streaming.
Since 2014 I've used a Pro-ject Box Design CD Box RS dedicated transport, initially into the matching DAC, then for the last few years a much-modded Audio Note UK DAC 1.1S from ANUK's shoebox era. The Pro-ject blew the socks off an assortment of competitors including Cyrus and Rega, but curiosity got the better of me, and so I recently purchased a used Jay's CDT2 Mk2 from ebay.
It was immediately obvious that it offered significantly better resolution and musicality than I'd been enjoying for nigh-on nine years.
Such is the nature of Audiophilia nervosa that the lid was lifted a couple of days later. Component quality was high, build quality was high, and most things were overspecified. Nice.
The only obvious upgrade (apparently) lay in replacing the main PCB with the Mk3 version. Jay's Audio's parent company is Beatechnik; contact with them resulted in a near instant positive response, and a ~£700 upgrade kit reached me in just over four working days. Great company to deal with, super-helpful and responsive.
Old and new PCBs - new PCB installed:
Installing the main board is very simple - unplug five jacks, undo some nuts and screws on the back panel, remove the 10 PCB securing screws and lift-out. There is also a new screen - mine had already been replaced with the newer version at some point, but I put the brand new one in anyway as these things can be short-lived. To do this you need to remove the large and heavy CNC-milled laser pickup assembly off its four alloy pillars, and then remove the front two pillars.
New in, old bagged:
For purely OCD reasons, various mild steel screws and fittings were replaced with stainless steel equivalents throughout this job.
This done, the transport was reassembled and left playing for a few hours before listening.
I admit I was trepidatious: was this going to be one of those 'upgrades' that in reality was just a way for a manufacturer to make the same thing more cheaply? Not really likely to be honest - the large OCXO in the new board, its greater number of noise-reducing small inductors, its widespread replacement of thru-hole components with SMD for shorter path-lengths, &c, &c, all make a lot of sense...
But £700 is a lot for an upgrade to a five year old item... However, the leap in performance was at least as big as swapping from Pro-ject to Jay's in the first place. Overall resolution had significantly improved, soundstaging was wider and better defined, and hints of stridency and congestion during large musical peaks were gone. In a resolving system this is a terrific value-for-money upgrade: don't hesitate if you own a Mk2.
A couple of things remained to do inside the machine, both involved the mains side of things.
Grounding to Earth involved using numerous points on the chassis, none of which made any attempt to prevent HF noise from entering from outside, nor proliferating from within. To improve this I first rewired the short internal mains lead with some doubly-screened mains cable of a kind I favour for mains leads. I added a new 3-way terminal block to the internal mains noise filter, and wired the Earth to this via a low value, high current inductor - screen printing on the small PCB suggests its designer had originally intended to do things this way and later omitted it, perhaps for cost reasons. I then took an Earth from this to a more central point in the chassis, again via a high-current inductor and screened wire. Lastly I reinstalled the filter board on four soft rubber anti-vibration standoffs. Absurd overkill, but OCD says "Yes."...
Another issue - the only fault I'd encountered with this player - was noisy transformers. I was a little surprised by this as I've been using DC blockers for years since discovering they didn't just stop the racket of magnetostricting transformers, but also make everything sound better: not all saturating transformers are making mechanical noises after-all... But, for whatever reason, these were.
The solution was fairly simple - the transformers are tightly-potted in steel cans, and the maker's attempts to prevent those cans grounding had failed and they were thus causing some kind of eddy-current related noise. I lifted the transformers with some small silicon washers and secured them with nylon rather than steel screws with more silicon washers on top:
No more noisy Tx.
The last little job I did was to remove the EVA foam used to provide a degree of isolation of the laser pickup tray from its supporting pillars. This kind of foam is good for many uses where conformability is a good thing, but when it's subjected to long-term point loading (as here), it tends to simply squash completely flat, providing no isolation at-all. Instead I replaced it with the equivalent thickness of Sorbothane. I'm not sure how well or otherwise the CDM-4 deals with vibration, but this should at the very least make its life easier and reduce the need for error-correction...
Looks scruffy due to using random offcuts!
The various bits of work I did off my own bat are probably of limited sonic value, but they're easy to do, and scratch the OCD itch; the later PCB is hugely worthwhile and super-easy to install, so should be anyone's priority.
There's a lot of life left in the old CD-dog yet!
Since 2014 I've used a Pro-ject Box Design CD Box RS dedicated transport, initially into the matching DAC, then for the last few years a much-modded Audio Note UK DAC 1.1S from ANUK's shoebox era. The Pro-ject blew the socks off an assortment of competitors including Cyrus and Rega, but curiosity got the better of me, and so I recently purchased a used Jay's CDT2 Mk2 from ebay.
It was immediately obvious that it offered significantly better resolution and musicality than I'd been enjoying for nigh-on nine years.
Such is the nature of Audiophilia nervosa that the lid was lifted a couple of days later. Component quality was high, build quality was high, and most things were overspecified. Nice.
The only obvious upgrade (apparently) lay in replacing the main PCB with the Mk3 version. Jay's Audio's parent company is Beatechnik; contact with them resulted in a near instant positive response, and a ~£700 upgrade kit reached me in just over four working days. Great company to deal with, super-helpful and responsive.
Old and new PCBs - new PCB installed:
Installing the main board is very simple - unplug five jacks, undo some nuts and screws on the back panel, remove the 10 PCB securing screws and lift-out. There is also a new screen - mine had already been replaced with the newer version at some point, but I put the brand new one in anyway as these things can be short-lived. To do this you need to remove the large and heavy CNC-milled laser pickup assembly off its four alloy pillars, and then remove the front two pillars.
New in, old bagged:
For purely OCD reasons, various mild steel screws and fittings were replaced with stainless steel equivalents throughout this job.
This done, the transport was reassembled and left playing for a few hours before listening.
I admit I was trepidatious: was this going to be one of those 'upgrades' that in reality was just a way for a manufacturer to make the same thing more cheaply? Not really likely to be honest - the large OCXO in the new board, its greater number of noise-reducing small inductors, its widespread replacement of thru-hole components with SMD for shorter path-lengths, &c, &c, all make a lot of sense...
But £700 is a lot for an upgrade to a five year old item... However, the leap in performance was at least as big as swapping from Pro-ject to Jay's in the first place. Overall resolution had significantly improved, soundstaging was wider and better defined, and hints of stridency and congestion during large musical peaks were gone. In a resolving system this is a terrific value-for-money upgrade: don't hesitate if you own a Mk2.
A couple of things remained to do inside the machine, both involved the mains side of things.
Grounding to Earth involved using numerous points on the chassis, none of which made any attempt to prevent HF noise from entering from outside, nor proliferating from within. To improve this I first rewired the short internal mains lead with some doubly-screened mains cable of a kind I favour for mains leads. I added a new 3-way terminal block to the internal mains noise filter, and wired the Earth to this via a low value, high current inductor - screen printing on the small PCB suggests its designer had originally intended to do things this way and later omitted it, perhaps for cost reasons. I then took an Earth from this to a more central point in the chassis, again via a high-current inductor and screened wire. Lastly I reinstalled the filter board on four soft rubber anti-vibration standoffs. Absurd overkill, but OCD says "Yes."...
Another issue - the only fault I'd encountered with this player - was noisy transformers. I was a little surprised by this as I've been using DC blockers for years since discovering they didn't just stop the racket of magnetostricting transformers, but also make everything sound better: not all saturating transformers are making mechanical noises after-all... But, for whatever reason, these were.
The solution was fairly simple - the transformers are tightly-potted in steel cans, and the maker's attempts to prevent those cans grounding had failed and they were thus causing some kind of eddy-current related noise. I lifted the transformers with some small silicon washers and secured them with nylon rather than steel screws with more silicon washers on top:
No more noisy Tx.
The last little job I did was to remove the EVA foam used to provide a degree of isolation of the laser pickup tray from its supporting pillars. This kind of foam is good for many uses where conformability is a good thing, but when it's subjected to long-term point loading (as here), it tends to simply squash completely flat, providing no isolation at-all. Instead I replaced it with the equivalent thickness of Sorbothane. I'm not sure how well or otherwise the CDM-4 deals with vibration, but this should at the very least make its life easier and reduce the need for error-correction...
Looks scruffy due to using random offcuts!
The various bits of work I did off my own bat are probably of limited sonic value, but they're easy to do, and scratch the OCD itch; the later PCB is hugely worthwhile and super-easy to install, so should be anyone's priority.
There's a lot of life left in the old CD-dog yet!
