CD Transport - budget in the order of £1500

I think I pointed out that already if you look at one or two of my other posts on this thread.  Not the bit about the "reason for the choices" being wrong, but that excellent sound quality can be achieved for less, however, for some, that's not the only reason for buying "up".

With so much money to burn, why not get a proper blind test organised? I personally think that any well made transport will sound identical to any other when used through a DAC. But if you disagree, why not test yourself. If you can tell the difference between using a £200 CD player via digital out and a £1500 then you win. If you can't, you also win.

These sums of money for essentially cheap components in a fancy case are my personal equivalent of emails from certain African nations saying you can claim millions if you send them a grand....some people fall for it and most take it with a large, dried up Pacific Ocean sized pinch of salt.

You could possibly improve matters by streaming from a hard drive, or better still a solid state drive. HDD is many times less likely to give errors and SSD has no moving parts.

Boy am I glad I spent the evening in the pub!  I've spotted one or two interesting rather than fanatical comments and so far I think there are just two or three suggestions that actually attempt to answer the original question.  Thank you for these.  See you tomorrow.

It was meant to be funny.  Failed as usual.  Ah well...

It's amazing sometimes that people can't just answer the question that is put forward. The OP has mentioned a couple of times that he is going to be buying a better transport regardless, and the "you should do this instead" and "it's all BS" comments still flow forth. 

Not really the way to keep forum members is it - unless that's the intention...

Generally speaking when used as a transport with an external DAC any well built cd player/transport will sound the same. But buying a solidly built one with fast operating speeds will still have its advantages.

Some brands do offer "matching" DAC's and transports which have custom clock syncronization (to reduce jitter), they will usually then have 2 cables from the cd to the dac. In such a case using them together will in most cases give better sound than matching the DAC with any other cd player/transport.

So unless you are looking at such a combo, choose the cd transport you like for its design, solid built and speed of operations and you should be good to go.

My main one would be to have your CD8se upgraded to a CDT transport or to the CDXTse2, which can also be improved by adding a PSX-R at some point - the PSX-R will then be in charge of spinning the disc. Cyrus tried the PSX-R supply's g various parts of their CD players, and found that supplying the drive mechanism made the biggest difference.

Even with the amount of manufacturers we deal with. There's not too many dedicated transports around nowadays after they fell out of favour many years ago. I guess they might make a bit of a comeback off the back of the DAC resurgence, but with streamers taking over the market. It's a very small market for a manufacturer to target.

I suppose the good thing about upgrading to a Cyrus transport is that they make their own laser mechs,so they're not at the mercy of Philips and Sony who are notorious for discontinuing laser mechs on a regular basis (one reason why Cyrus decided to make their own). At least Cyrus can make CD players and transports for as long as they like - and Cyrus ones are still selling (probably because the likes of Linn, Classe, Bryston etc have stopped making them).

Going slightly above the 1500 market you should def try the bel canto cd2 its got a built in dac and is head and shoulders above whats been mentioned so far

Cyrus are pretty much the only company that design and use their own CD drives and are very good at that.. I'd agree with david and either sell your CD player and get a second hand CD-T or if you really think it's worth it a CD xt+2 or whatever they're called.. Before though i'd do a side by side test to see if you can hear a difference.. Your talkin 3 x the price remember.. I'd personally get a CD-T if transport is 100% the way you want to go.. Although i would (and did) get a streamer with digital inputs and rip to a NAS (external HDD for now). You could dem the Musical fidelity as well but probably uses a generic philps or sony CD spinner (not saying it won't be superior as a transport to a DVD player thought of course).. 

Go for the Roksan Caspian CDP adn AMP.

kr

Eduardo

A £10 PC DVD-RW will grab every last drop of data from a given CD at 40x speed. That's no "missed data" as some would have you believe... No errors, just 100% perfect verified data.

It would be fairly moronic to believe any modern, fully working CD transport upwards of £50 wouldn't do the same at normal speeds.

Save your dosh.

If you want to upgrade your Cyrus cd player you may want to look at what Mapleshades do to improve them.

The last time I tried a CD on a Blu-ray player my (normally very quiet) old Sony S370 started sounding like a turbofan spinning up to full power on an airliner! 

With DVDs and Blu-rays the fan never kicked in but the CD had it going at an alarming rate.

When I get home later I will try a CD on my S390 (also extremely quiet with BDs and DVDs).

It is connected (via optical digital) to the same internal DAC that the built-in CD player (in my M-CR603) uses, so it should be a fair comparison. (Assuming the S390 doesn't also want to start emulating a turbine like the S370 did with CD!)

It was always drummed into me at school, before exams, to make sure I had carefully read and understood the question, before attempting to answer it.

I've not heard of Mapleshades; I'll have a look.