Bang For Your Buck Best Value CD Transport

Yeap the Pioneers are excellent transports. I use the 578A as a transport. Loads faster than any unit I've spent time with that includes the Quad 99 CDp,Arcam DV27,Meridan 500 something? Too many numbers to remember ;-). I would think the 563a should be the same. You'll find similar transport mechanisms in the Esoteric and Ayre players . They both use the Pioneer transports with some extra modifications. Bottom line the transports are very solid..the players aren't good for much else though unless modded to the hilt for analog out playback.

There always seem to be a number of CAL Delta transports available here for $200-300. They are excellent transports.

Sogood1,

I do realize he did say bang-for-the-buck, but the original poster asked for "best transport regardless of price". And I did compare the Pioneer 563A against some other budget players (eg. Toshiba 3950, Panasonic RP56) and didn't find the Pioneer to be particularly better or worse as a transport compared to these others.

And yeah, the Empirical mods are expensive (with all the available mods for the S7700, it was about $1300). Still, I have yet to find anything that clearly beats it in any price category.

With the budget players, I'd strongly recommend making sure that you use a true 75ohm digital cable, and that the length be between 1.5m-2m....

Woops...I guess I read the original post wrong. He did say "I DON'T want to know"...I thought he said "I want to know".

Doh! Good thing my hearing still works... ;-)