Bang For Your Buck Best Value CD Transport

Proceed CDD, essentially a Mark Levinson No. 37, but go for around $1000 used if you can find one, to aprox. $2000 for the 37.

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... ;-)

I have a Pioneer DVD 563A modded by Modwright. I use it as a transport along with a Bel Canto DAC. It sounds better as it gets older. I don't think Modwright mods this unit any more. When Modwright sent it back I was told it would take about 200 hours before everything started sounding great and he was WRIGHT!!

Matchstikman, I actually had my Pioneer 563A modded by Audience...essentially changed all the caps with Auricaps and all the wiring with Audience hookup wire, and a few other parts replaced (no re-design of the player, just upgraded a variety of parts)...and the performance improved significantly. Still not up to where the Empirical S7700 is at, but it made a $150 player sound like a more expensive one, and the transport section was improved too.