Ayon CD-2 sonics? thoughts? opinions?

I have a CD-2 unit in for review, and I am in the rare position of having extensive experience with all three Ayon players, most of it in side by side comparisons.

The CD-2 is a vast improvement over the CD-1; no contest. It would be wrong to consider them near equals in terms of performance. They are in completely different leagues.

The long term question will be how the CD-2 compares to the CD-3 (two chassis design). I have not gotten into direct comparisons with the CD-3 yet, but the CD-2 appears to be an assault on best attainable Redbook sound in a single chassis design. I will refrain from drawing any firm conclusions as my time with it has been short, and more will be learned as the review continues (The review may contain idiosyncrasies or caveats if applicable). However, I will say that the player does seem initially to be living up to the expectations I had for it when I heard it briefly at CES.

Doug- Is it true that the Ayon was using the Gabriel Gold
Rapture interconnects at the show as member audio852 mentioned.
This would be the first time these cables made a public appearance.There is alot of talk on a thread here and people seem to love them.Did you get to hear them?
On a more relevant note
I posted a question that no one has yet to answer.
Maybe you can help ? If I'm only running single-ended is their a difference between the NEW CD-1S and CD-2.
Their specs look similar
Don't put yourself out on a limb you e-mail me outside the thread if you wish.
thanks
Don

I do not know offhand if the Gabriel Gold was used at the show. The information I obtained on the room I posted a pic of in my CES report was that Ayon used the Clarity Cable power conditioner and the Echole Cables. Whether Gabriel Gold was used in that room I do not know, or if at all at this show. Contact Charlie Harrison at USA Tube Audio and he may be able to tell you.

I have not compared the CD-1S with the CD-2. I suppose it is conceivable that the single ended output would be similar, but I have serious reservations about that. My guess is it would be more a case of wishful thinking, "Oooh, I could get the performance of a $5.5K player for half the cost..." It certainly would not be wise of Ayon to make a player that was identical in single ended output on two players at big price differences. Ayon has never done so in the past, why now? What motivation would Ayon have to undercut their primo player with a nearly identical one?

In casual observation I see several differences in the specs, including tube complement, D/A conversion and number of transformers. In my thinking just the tube complement alone would be enough to substantially change the performance, let alone differences in the D/A conversion. I'm not going to spend the time going back to research it, but it seems to me that the CD-1 and CD-3 units shared a lot of similar specs as well, and they were separated by quite a wide margin in terms of performance. I certainly would not anticipate these two (CD-1s and CD-2) to be identical in single ended performance. It looks like the transport and some of the topology is similar, but that's a long way from identical.

FWIW, the impression I got from Paul at USA Tube Audio is that the CD-1S is designed to be lower cost and slightly lower performance than even the CD-1. Although the CD-1 is now discontinued in Europe, I believe Paul told me Ayon intends to sell the CD-1 in the US for a bit longer.

I suppose what is implied here is that the CD-2 will be vastly superior to the CD-1S.

An additional thought; I have not found the sound of an economical sibling player used as transport to be identical to the more expensive model when shunted through a DAC. Though the laser assembly is identical in many cases, the difference in topology is such that the performance is significantly different (let's say, with $40K rigs as a baseline) even when the player is operating as a transport. Whether such differences are worth it to you - well, that's your call.

Questions such as:

Will the performance of the less expensive player operating as a transport exceed that of its internal DAC? (possibly, depending on external DAC and Digital cable)

Will such a CD1S with external DAC exceed performance of the CD-2? (Doubtful; you may come closer, but then you're spending nearly the cost of the CD-2)

My guess is that the CD1S with the Cambridge Audio DAC Magic might be a really fun, good performing combo. It's a combo I might try if I had the time. You might end up finding that it's not significantly better than the CD-1S alone. It's extremely difficult to cobble together economical sources which are hugely better than a primo cdp.

Absolute answers to such questions would only be found by actually doing the comparisons.