GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: A contemporary great CD transport for under $100.

Post Subject: A contemporary great CD transport for under $100.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 9/15/2011

I know, I know some of you clicked this thread in anticipation that I will reveal a new “secretive” CD transport that Sounds great. I wish I might...

What this thread all about is about application of a common sense to the subject of digital transports. A digital transport read the disk and outputs binary data. Digital has within itself the error flags, many transport read with errors and better of them do not read with errors. We discard those read with errors, let it to be 50% of the “bad” transports. Those that do read with no errors still sound very different. I know that now we are thinking about digital interfaces, location of cloaks, type of clock synchronization, the topology of DACs and the way how data acquisition happens in the given DAC. Still, I would propose that all of it irrelevant. It all of cause very relevant in total sound of transport/DAC tandem but still with ANY DAC better sounding transports produce better sound. The most reasonable question would be: where is the quality of transport sound come from? We all understand why transport might sound bad but why some of them sound good? That is the question.

The irony is that transports the designed to sound better do not always sound better. We know the transports with astronomical price tag and with very sophisticated internals that are not so good performers sonically. Did you ever ask yourself why? I spoke today with a friend of mine who knows digital very well and he assured me that with his expertise in digital he can defeat any statement that would propose any single reason why one no-error reading transport sounds better then another. Even he admits the transports sound differently but he insists that there is no explanation to the phenomena.

If so, if the sonic character of a transport is not truly predictable characteristic then can we call it random success characteristic? Well if it is the case then why we shall not proposed that there are some $100 CD transports that sound great. If we know that rice and amount engineering do not assure Sound in CD transports then the rate of success in transports is equally distributed among $100 CD transports and $30,000 CD transports.

So, I would like to know what contemporary $100 CD transport sound good. I ask about the contemporary as the nowadays transports have much more powerful lather and able to read what the 20 years old transports are not able to read (CDRs for instance have less reflective power then commercial CD of 20 years back).

The Cat

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