Good CDTransport (player) without DAC?

Jay's would be my first choice, but not in my budget. I have a Marantz HD CD-1. It's a player, but has all the digital outs. MSRP $500

Cambridge Audio CXC

I see you have an elac streamer. I guess I’m not certain whether that has a CD transport in it or not, and if it does why you want another.
if the answer is "it doesn't" - then: Laptop. Rip the CDs FLAC/ALAC. Send them to elac or play back bit-perfect via USB which puts the DAC in charge of timing. more convenient, better sound than almost any thing using SPDIF.
Probably worth a sidebar to explain that traditional digital interfaces "SPDIF" depended on the jitter performance of the sending transport.  Bad transport bad jittery.  Modern USB is the reverse - you could send the bits with HUGE jitter and it will generally matter not one bit.  Its all re-clocked by the DAC.   IN general SPDIF is now to be avoided....and the assumptions of the sonic contributions of transports partially or mostly discarded. Noise does still matter though - for reasons i don't fully get.


I think Windows finally handles high res USB profiles better in 10, but generally Macs have had the best performance as the digital source, along with ROON/Linux (especially ROCK). On a Mac iTunes with Bitperfect ($10) sounds phenomenal, although iTunes is pretty awful for classical (it s really set up for pop and rock - artist --> album --> song rather than Piece --> orchestra --> performance or other variants.
G

mahler123763 posts09-01-2019 10:51pmCambridge Audio transport usually gets recommended

Cambridge CXC transport is a cracker for just $600, common CD laser not DVD, that cheap to get, should it’s ever needed, and it’s got one of the lowest jitter performance you can get, Lampizator said the output wave form oscilloscope shot I showed him said it's very very good.

https://www.tnt-audio.com/sorgenti/cambridge_cxc_e.html

Cheers George

You can get the CXC for half that as a “refurb” on eBay. But it looks new. FYI.