Alesis Masterlink as a CD Player?

I bought a 9600 to use as a transport based on friend's recommendation, but it is not user friendly in that the remote doesn't have track access by number which means to get to track 12 you have to push play and then push next track 11 times. The other thing I don't like aobut it is mechanical noise, it reads the disc from a computer drive to the hard drive so it makes some (too much for me) mechanical noise as it reads the CD at high speed. As for sound quality (as a transport) I think it has a lot to offer and is similar to using a (what is that thing? I think it is called a "digital time lens") which clocked the player output to a hard drive and reclocked it out with theoretically low jitter. Final analysis (as a transport), not worth it if you want easy track access and don't like exterraneous noise.

Roger

I have one. Its not for use as a CD player. Its really a mastering editing tool for high resoluition 24/96 archiving.
I record Vinyl onto it and it comes out very well.

Vincent

The ML is too noisy and too cumbersome to be used as a transport. It does what it's designed to do quite well, but it was never designed to be used as a transport for a serious audio system. OTOH I do use it as a transport when I want to break-in a component and need to put a CD on endless repeat. I'd rather burn up its cheaply-replaced CD-RW drive on stuff like that than the expensive drive mechanism in my primary transport.

I just read that the Alesis was selected as a class A componnets by Stereophile. Why if all the threads here point to a noisy, complicated to use, poorly built, etc. unit. I guess I will have to hook mine up after I get back to the US to see for my self.

The masterlink is a pro audio tool and does what it does for a price point that has no peers.If trying to get a sub one thousand dollar cdp is your objective there are many choices.Pro audio is a different scene than the audiophile world with reliability higher on the priority list.There are engineers who are also audiophiles but they are a minority and your cd collections sound quality will bear that out.I own a cdp that costs roughly 6x what the masterlink does and the differences are not that great.