Thiel Owners

Labor Day - All

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.