Review: Audio Note CDT-2 Transport

Category: Digital

Gentle reader – please be aware that this is an update to my earlier full review of the Audio Note CDT II transport here on Audiogon.
KevinF.

The CDT II is stuffed with Black Gate electrolytics, a make of capacitor whose remarkable sonic characteristics UK professional reviewer Martin Collums has recently devoted a whole article to. Among the idiosyncrasies noted by Collums is the long -- 300 hours + -- burning in time that Black Gates require before they give up their music goodies.

Judging from Internet conference threads, this extended burn-in time is noteworthy, but clearly not widely understood. One recent purchaser of a CDT II announced that he couldn’t live with the lightweight sound of his new transport and was selling it on after only a few hundred hours of running.

That’s a great shame. He’s going to miss out because that transport will sound very good indeed when it is finally burned in, but that will not be until – at least in my limited experience – it has passed the 600-hour mark.

The Audio Note CDT II is not perfect. However it does deliver a remarkably musically coherent and satisfying experience that gets closer to live sound for the price than any transport I’ve heard. But not out of the box.

At around 100 hours (these are approximate milestones and apply only to the player I bought) it began to develop a semblance of top-end, but an unpleasantly brittle, on-edge one.

At 200 hours it still had no real bottom end and what there was sounded loose and flabby.

By 300 the top-end had begun to develop a sweeter and more natural sound with less edginess but the bottom end had still not tightened up. The transport was sounding a pale shadow of the demonstration model that I had auditioned. In fact it was not until it had passed the 600-hour mark that I heard the beginnings of a familiar musicality and airiness.

This morning, at getting on for 800 hours of constant running, it is showing signs of the taughtness and weight of bass that I also found so impressive in the demonstration model. I expect the new transport to continue to improve still further.

It’s easy to see how this very long running in period could cause impatient purchasers to dismiss their new transport as lightweight and unsatisfactory. Certainly, if I’d bought a CDT II on the strength of a favourable review and had not been expecting the break-in the take so very, very long, I’d too have been temped to show it the door.

But surely that’s a problem that could easily be resolved by accurate setting of expectations: tell the purchaser right up front that their new transport WILL take, say, 800 hours before it sounds right.

I am happy to testify that in respect of the CDT II, the wait is well worth it.