New, Very Interesting CD Transport

Makes me want to order one and get my collection of Monster CD Sound Rings out of storage.

I’m having a more difficult time refuting ‘71’s cheap CD player claim than his stance on power cords. I used a cheap drive and software that compares results to others that have ripped the same CD to store a bit perfect copy on my Aurender and that copy compares to Qobuz streaming. This does use an error checking step that isn’t available with a player. I always thought that cheap transports provided error prone reads, or more transmission errors, but not sure that this is always the case.

I’ll note that the review posted above is limited to a review of features and is pretty limited should you be using this review in order to make a purchasing decision. On another topic, I just received two Chinese made rice storage bins and I can report that they each store 15Kg of rice, but no Wi-Fi, or USB functionality.

I see no mention of SACD, and

"strictly a digital transport"

"Optional internal upsampling to hi-res PCM or DSD comes courtesy of a CT7302CL chip." A bit more info about that would be helpful. 

as well as over-clocking, filters if any ... the other ingredients of the salad.

So reading the specs on this thing it appears to be a streamer with a disc drive as it supports:

Playback from USB Drive

-        2.4G/5G Wi-Fi with DLNA/Airplay support

-        Bluetooth 5.0 input  with LDAC, AAC and SBC support

So a CD transport but more it looks like a solid value Shanling has been building disc spinners for quite a few years now.

Folks, there are those that are transport aware and those that are not.

It’s not a plus for CD playing to have a disc drive and electronics that handles SACD or BluRay. That’s actually a minus. Different colored lasers arcing in different patterns are required for SACD, etc. Also, Computer disc drives, and multi-format drives have to play at different speeds, constantly speeding up and slowing down.

A pure Redbook CD Transport is optimized for CD playing - the drive, the drive speed, the laser, the power supply, the digital handling within are all important. As you may have heard everything is important in digital playback.

This player competes against the Audiolab CDT7000 at $800, the Audiolab CDT9000 at $1,500, The Jay’s Audio CDT2 MK3 at $2,500, the Pro-Ject RS2T at $3100. And other transports between $5000 and $18000.

For this price, the Shanling surpasses all in terms of inputs and outputs and overall features.

How does it sound? It’s not been released yet. Just announced and set to be released by next month.