New, Very Interesting CD Transport

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.

The Shanling transport looks interesting and has a few features that mat be valuable to some users. One of the key things about the Shanling is that they specify the brand and model of drive they are using. I don’t know whether or not this Phillips drive was developed specifically for audio playback but hopefully it is a robust drive. The overarching problem with audio transports is that they often use a cheap drive meant for computer use (spin up, read data, turn off) and these tend to fail under audio use. A computer drive was not designed for hour upon hour of playback on a daily basis and they simply wear out.

I’m the unlucky victim of this problem. I bought a PSA PerfectWave Transport ($4k retail) which seems to be built to a high standard except for the assembly at the heart of the unit - the drive itself. They used a cheap rotgut computer drive that must have cost them $10 wholesale (yes, in a $4,000 transport) and I’m on my third drive and it is beginning to fail. PSA wants $500 to fix it which ain’t gonna happen. I’m going to try the surgery myself and if I ’f it up it goes to the recycling center.

My advice about transports is to make sure the heart of the thing is actually designed for the demands of music playback. My strategy to solve this problem long term is that I bought a Marantz KI Ruby SACD player on closeout ($3000) which has a drive optimized for music playback. It was designed and built by Marantz from the ground up and should last forever. I’ve had two other Marantz players which I played the hell out of and never had a drive failure. The reason I need a transport is that I have a Black Ice tube DAC that I like the sound of for CD playback.

OTOH, if you are comfortable that all transports sound the same then a cheap DVD player is a great option. For $30 bucks you can just replace the thing when it breaks.

True:

ANYTHING that reads a CD spins at the same variable speed to maintain the bit rate?

CDs spin at an angular speed of 500 rpm when read from the center and 200 rpm when read near the circumference. Besides having an angular velocity, the CD also has a constant linear velocity (CLV). The CLV of a CD has been standardized by Philips at 1.2 to 1.4 m/s.

SACD's have separate lasers, focused on the hybrid's alternate SACD/DSD layer. Beneficial, not a handicap. Note the optional upscale to DSD in the unit you mentioned.