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transport sound quality of good modern CDPs

Used to be they made big heavy expensive CD transports that improved the sound out of your DAC over a standard CDP transport section. Very few are made anymore, yet there are plenty of good outboard DACs on the market. The better one-box CDPs can often sound as good as redbook allows, yet most seem to use generic off-the-shelf ho-hum transport mechanics with maybe a little tweaking to the servo circuitry. So my question is two-fold:

1) Have the lightweight seemingly modest transports in excellent sounding $2-4K CDPs gotten good enough that their mfgs feel their sound can't be significantly improved by using a near-industrial-grade transport?

2) Would there be a notable sound difference by running the digital output of say a Musical Fidelity A308 CDP into a $5K outboard DAC vs running a Levinson No 37 transport into the same DAC? Or for that matter, a Rega Planet or NAD C541i?
128x128sdecker
rkeman
66 posts
 
The lack of decent quality CD transports today amazed me as well until I started auditioning a number of transports from a number of manufacturers (Theta, EAD, Audio Alchemy, and Wadia) and discovered only nominal differences between them. These were used with a number of different DAC's (MSB, Wadia, and Bel Canto) and still I found no differences that would merit spending substantially more for one compared with the others. The differences between the DAC's was much easier to appreciate. Currently I use a Panasonic RP-91 DVD-A player with a Wadia 25 DAC in my reference stereo rig and it sounds great. Incidently, I also found no significant differences between the coaxial, balanced, and ST optical outputs in any of the configurations I tried. Off hand, I would just use the best reasonably priced DVD player available as a transport and invest the difference in program material or other components. Best of luck!
sdecker's avatar
sdecker OP
143 posts
 
rkeman, did you compare any of the listed transports to your dvd player or the transport of an everyday one-box CDP? I would imagine the differences between good transports would be less than between any good transport and a generic CDP transport. But that's why I posed the question.

I have the BelCanto DAC2 which seems to be much less sensitive to transport quality than most dacs (no diff between my '90 cdp, '00 cdr and '01 dvd transports), but I haven't auditioned a big-rig dedicated transport.
rkeman
66 posts
 
Great question. Yes, I compared the mentioned transports to the Panasonic RP-91 which is the primary reason that I currently employ it in a mostly-music stereo system. As I wrote before, there really was very little difference between any of them. To be honest I couldn't even develop a real preference among the transports I auditioned. Perhaps this is why not many dedicated CD transports are being manufactured anymore while at the same time the stereo DAC market remains quite active.
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
DVD players will generally be much better transports than cd-only players. The tracking, servo and optical systems are much better in order to read DVD's. With the appropriate mods, most DVD players can become superb transports.
vgrubb
33 posts
 
Sdecker,
You should try a good transport like a Levinson, Audiomeca or Accustic Arts. You'll be amazed at the difference over a DVD or CDP.
Vic
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