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New Transport? / Streamer? / CD Player?

Looking for help, I want to improve my CD playback and my bottleneck is my CD transport. I'm using a Cambridge Audio CXC transport with an Audio Mirror Tubadour III SE. I love how my AM DAC frames the music so a new transport seems to be the logical path. I have 500+ CDs and primarily listen to LPs now. I would like up the quality of my CD playback thinking this will be my long term path as I get older, yikes!

I seem to have 3 options:

1. Buy a quality transport, these products look interesting:

Pro-ject CD Box RS2 T (needs LPS to sound best?)
Jays Audio CDT2-Mk3 (can't turn off upsampling?)
Audio Note CDT Zero or One

2. Buy a streamer that can either store my ripped CDs or can read them from an external HD?

3. Sell my DAC and buy a one box CD player?

#1 seems to be the most logical but that's mainly because I have limited experience with #2. I have used various laptops but found that my CA CXC outperforms it considerably when playing CDs. I know you can modify computers to do a better but it seemed to be much more complicated and expensive path just to play a CD. I see there are some streamers that are like dedicated and modified computers, some have internal storage others with USB ports so you have attach a hard drive. Are any of these work considering? Keeping in mind my primary objective is to improve my CD playback vs convenience of working from an app. Is a streamer a more complicated device, needing more engineering to deal with noise or vibration issues? Some are very expensive but aren't they just dedicated audio computers.
Are there other transports that I should consider?

Another option is sell off my DAC and buy a one box CD player. Relative the cost of adding transport my budget would be about $5K. Are there any one box CD player options that I should consider? I went for the AM DAC because of how the DAC frames the music, it's an R2R DAC and the music is very fluid and musical. I'm sold on this direction for CD playback the musical experience is similar to vinyl.

Any help appreciated! Auditioning any of the above is impossible where I live.
musichead
musichead's avatar
musichead OP
94 posts
 
@xrayz there is a Youtube video that I followed, basically separating some wires that are clipped together and putting some Dynamat on the inside of the lid and around the base where possible. It made the music tighter, slightly better tonality and darker backgrounds. Worthwhile IMO.
What's holding me back from the streamer route is my initial experience with a laptop. I burned lots of CD and used a few different programs working from my phone, it was convenient but I could never get the sound to be as good as my CXC transport. USB vs Coax connection? Did some investigation on how to improve the computer setup or what really needs to be done. Once enlightened I gave up. To many variables that need PS isolation. Noise seems to be the huge problem with digital. In theory a CD transport is more simple and less functions to isolate. In the end I just want to get the most out of my CDs and DAC.

Do transports impose a character to the sound or do they just get the most out of a DAC? the better the transport the better the DAC will sound? or do they impose a character? Someone wrote me saying the Proj-ect transport can be very transparent, analytical and cold? maybe it's just revealing the failing of CD?


ghdprentice's avatar
ghdprentice
9,397 posts
 
Every component imposes an imprint on the sound.
musichead's avatar
musichead OP
94 posts
 
Has anyone tried a Naim Uniti Core? It's a storage and server. Storage is convenient but how good is the server side? It uses a LPS.
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