Phillips no longer producing transports

Agreed Jafant, Rich and Nonoise made cogent points. I think the likely outcome is with cd sales declining, some manufacturers may go down the server route rather than tooling up to build their own transport and just see what happens in future. The larger players with more corporate funds may well build a proprietary transport mechanism or negotiate an OEM contract with someone like Esoteric. Of course doing so means designing around the new transport from scratch.

It is likely Phillips won't relinquish the patent for their Pro 2 transport, but unless cd sales increase which seems unlikely, Phillips for one are out of the transport-building business.

However as Rich eluded to, their are other transport options such as using a cd/dvd rom drive as used by Cary, Oppo/MSB etc. Boulder are doing something similar and use a very accurate cd/dvd rom drive sourced from the Supercomputer industry. Their 1021 network player is ideally placed for the future with a readily available/replaceable transport mechanism and the capability to stream over ethernet.

It will be interesting to see if shiny discs have a revival one day like vinyl!

A couple of the main engineers parted ways with philips a few years back and made their own company called stream unlimited,, this is in my Ayon owners manual, thus the pro transport rebourne!, My transport was made in 2013 for this Ayon 2s player., I also talked to paul at usa tube audio, the u.s. distributer for Ayon, He confirmed the story of stream unlimited that I researched originally to find out about the company.

Many Thanks! Melbguy and Audiolabyrinth.

Stream Unlimited in its previous iteration was the Philips Audio Video Innovation Centre based in Vienna. They developed new technologies and modules for Philips into ready for market products. Whilst under Philips umbrella, this centre likely developed the cd-pro2 transport for the company, who in turn later released the CD-Pro2LF in 2006 after Philips brought product development in-house. Incidentally 'LF' is short for "Lead free" which was required after the RoHS directive introduced on the 1st of July, 2006. So to clarify, Stream Unlimited did not manufacture Pro-2LF transports as used by Ayon, ARC and others. These were produced up to recently by Philips who have now ceased production. As far as I can tell, Stream Unlimited offer an optical storage product as well as software, hardware, wireless and compliance services.

I received feedback from one manufacturer who stated they will likely move out of disc spinners altogether toward a more profitable and sustainable business model. Boulder are already part way there with a hybrid disc/streamer product.

Let us hope that a more focused group will continue to produce CD drives, exclusively. As far as hybrid (cd/dvd drive + server/streamer) products go, those will be inferior because of multi-use ROM-based drives. Not the same quality standard.