Phillips no longer producing transports

When Valjoux decided to abandon the 7750 automatic movement and get with the digial watch craze, an engineer for Valjoux squirreled away the machinery for making them. It didn't take long for Valjoux to realize their mistake and the 7750 movement is still the workhorse for their line. They can't make enough of them and payment for that movement is made 6 to 12 months before any make receives the product, sometimes longer.

Thank goodness for that prescient engineer.

Crunching numbers for shareholders who can't see beyond the 1st quarter is common these days but hopefully, someone will see the value of putting away some nuts for the winter.

All the best,
Nonoise

All great points Rich and Nonoise. This is the perfect time for those companies to step up and develop their own transports. CD/DVD/BR players are not going away, anytime soon!

Agreed Jafant, Rich and Nonoise made cogent points. I think the likely outcome is with cd sales declining, some manufacturers may go down the server route rather than tooling up to build their own transport and just see what happens in future. The larger players with more corporate funds may well build a proprietary transport mechanism or negotiate an OEM contract with someone like Esoteric. Of course doing so means designing around the new transport from scratch.

It is likely Phillips won't relinquish the patent for their Pro 2 transport, but unless cd sales increase which seems unlikely, Phillips for one are out of the transport-building business.

However as Rich eluded to, their are other transport options such as using a cd/dvd rom drive as used by Cary, Oppo/MSB etc. Boulder are doing something similar and use a very accurate cd/dvd rom drive sourced from the Supercomputer industry. Their 1021 network player is ideally placed for the future with a readily available/replaceable transport mechanism and the capability to stream over ethernet.

It will be interesting to see if shiny discs have a revival one day like vinyl!

A couple of the main engineers parted ways with philips a few years back and made their own company called stream unlimited,, this is in my Ayon owners manual, thus the pro transport rebourne!, My transport was made in 2013 for this Ayon 2s player., I also talked to paul at usa tube audio, the u.s. distributer for Ayon, He confirmed the story of stream unlimited that I researched originally to find out about the company.

Many Thanks! Melbguy and Audiolabyrinth.