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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

Showing 2 responses by sdecker

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.
sdecker's avatar
sdecker OP
143 posts
 
VGrubb, I would love to audition a Levinson or equivalent transport, but don't know anyone with one, nor live near a dealer that carries high-end transports for home audition. Which is why I posted the question...

Brawny, I was using the MF308 as an example of a good CDP using what I presume is a mundane sub-Levinson drive. I use a good Philips CDP from '90 driving my BelCanto DAC2. And that has no problems reading 80min CDRs AND CDRWs. They don't make them like they used to. I'm sure you can get plenty of answers to your 308 question on this forum as that CDP has sold thousands.
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