Differences between cd transports?

Geoff yes, yes, and yes. What naysayers fail to understand is strands of wire are pulled/drawn through a die, rough edges are bent over on a microscopic level

Many cable companies put direction arrows on their jackets, so where does this silliness come from? Ignorance, or flat ou stupidity?

elizabeth, yes, before playing any new discs I always clean them with oil free soap and RO water. I used to use various treatments, but found over time that they oxidize creating a haze that the laser cannot read through 100%. 

That said my Marantz HD CD 1 is new but the laser is very fussy, or somewhat misaligned from the factory. Never had this issue with my Oppo 105 

The beauty of the trial process.

@tweak1 What audio tweakers fail to understand that not a single of these things make a damn bit of a difference at audio frequencies. You have to start moving into microwave frequencies for any of this to have measurable effects and even then it doesn't affect anything. The entire world is running on cheap ethernet cable and even cheaper fiberoptic cable with bit perfect data making it across oceans.

As to directionality, more often than not, it has to do shielding only being connected on one end. I assure you not one cable used to wire the entire new Stratcom operations center was tested for directionality. How in the world would the cable manufactures have any idea which way the cable was originally pulled through a die considering it was spooled and respooled many times before it ever arrived at their "manufacturing" facility where they slap fancy outer jackets on them and call it hifi audio cable.

astelmaszek"What audio tweakers fail to understand that not a single of these things make a damn bit of a difference at audio frequencies."

Do you base this claim, proclamation, and pronouncement on personal, first hand experience, experiments, and analysis or are you simply repeating a religious doctrine as has become so common this site recently?

Like clean power, feeding a CD playback system with a clean disc will almost always result in improved SQ.

(Elizabeth, +1)