New, Very Interesting CD Transport


On John Darko's website today we learn of the brand new Shanling ET3 CD Transport. And for $729 USD it looks really capable. Top loading with Philips SAA7824 drive. AES/EBU, coaxial, TOSLINK and I2S digital outputs. Plus Wifi and Bluetooth. USB to connect to a external HD and built in upsampling, too. It even will output digital to USB for connection to a DAC but not with upsampling.

Here's the skinny:

https://darko.audio/2023/06/shanlings-et3-cd-transport-comes-with-two-twists/

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I remember the CEC transport with the unique belt drive system. It was really expensive at the time. I seem to vaguely remember the price being somewhere around $10,000? As I recall it was positively reviewed by the audio critics.

Back to reality for my audio budget. lol

I use the transport section of an Onkyo C-7030 CD player with a few different dacs; all with good results. I paid $173 for it in 2017, and that included a separate 3 year extended warranty. Could the Shanling be that much better for $729? Maybe, maybe not.

It is kinda neat though. 😊

 

So has anyone actually tried this new Shanling ET3 CD Transport? If so, please give us a report on your impressions, and which other transport(s) you were comparing it to, as well as information on the other important parts of your system involved in the audio chain during the test.

Makes me want to order one and get my collection of Monster CD Sound Rings out of storage.

I’m having a more difficult time refuting ‘71’s cheap CD player claim than his stance on power cords. I used a cheap drive and software that compares results to others that have ripped the same CD to store a bit perfect copy on my Aurender and that copy compares to Qobuz streaming. This does use an error checking step that isn’t available with a player. I always thought that cheap transports provided error prone reads, or more transmission errors, but not sure that this is always the case.

I’ll note that the review posted above is limited to a review of features and is pretty limited should you be using this review in order to make a purchasing decision. On another topic, I just received two Chinese made rice storage bins and I can report that they each store 15Kg of rice, but no Wi-Fi, or USB functionality.