Thiel Owners

Happy Friday - All

Guys - I'm shopping for ideas. In assembling a system approachably priced for musicians and other non-audiophile music lovers, I hope to find a CD transport of merit. My hope is to find a good player for CD - with a plus for SACD, DVD-A, etc. A digital output via S/P-DIF and/or USB is necessary, but analog conversion/ outputs are not. The transport can't cost more than a $ thousand or two, hopefully less. Any ideas? Thanks

@tomthiel, There aren’t many transports that will output native SACD, etc., and those that do are usually more expensive. The closest machine than comes to mind for those prerequisties is the Oppo 105. The Oppo 105 can output SACD but might require a bit of technical gymnastics to do so. The Oppo 105 also does analog output, as well as high quality video and HDCD too. Oppo is out of the a/v business, but it is still offering quality customer support. Cambridge offered some transports, but some of those were just stripped down Oppos. Though I have no hands on experience with some of the new transports available, multiple reports of quality control issues with some, some use unappealing to me feeder loading, most just don’t appear to be very good values to me.

The problem with a transport with digital outs is hi-rez formats.  PS Audio has their Perfect Wave Transport but the current model which does SACD too is way beyond the desired budget..  Many people seem to like the Audiolab 6000CDT.  I believe Cambridge Audio also makes a transport.

@tomthiel

Playback of SACD disks via a disk player using an external DAC is a special use case. To my knowledge, there are essentially 2 ways to turn this trick aside from the PS Audio solution, both require that the disk player have an HDMI output (such as a SACD capable Blu Ray player like the Oppo’s).

To use the HDMI output directly requires a DAC with an HDMI input, such as a Bryston BDA3 or a NAD M51 (which like the Oppo is discontinued).

The second is to use something like the Geerfab D.BOB (digital breakout box), which is a $1000 item, and sits between your SACD player with HDMI output and a DSD capable DAC which supports DOP (DSD over PCM). There are modestly priced SACD capable Blu Ray players which can serve as your transport.

A totally different approach, and the one I utilize myself, is to rip the DSD layer from the SACD, and then stream to a DSD capable DAC. If interested in this later approach, PM me, and I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.