How old is too old?

a year ago i bought a new TEAC VRDS-701T CD ’only’ transport. it has the newest version of the BIG-BOY VRDS transport and is built like a tank. when i bought it the list price was $2799. now it’s $3299. 

https://teac.jp/int/product/vrds-701t/top

most SACD’s have a CD layer, so you can play all the discs. if you buy an SACD player and want the dsd layer, you are limited to the dac inside that transport, or need a proprietary interface that works with your dac so you are limited. i wanted to use my Wadax dac with a modestly priced transport so i could play silver discs. 

as far as performance, it was just ’ok’ using a SPIDF interface into my dac......until......i hooked up my Esoteric G1X Clock to it and then it came alive and is really quite fine sounding.

but it does the job and i can now play my 4000 CD’s and 1000 SACD’s again. and it works sufficiently with my $400k Wadax. no it does not quite match streaming on the Wadax, but then nothing else does either. it’s good enough to not avoid silver discs if i want that particular music, or a friend brings a CD over with them.

for around $3k why mess with old transports and worry about it?

Buy a streamer.  It can sound better.  

There are less repairman and less parts than ever.

For 3k you can surpass your Sacd

Some good points. Thanks, everyone.

You don't forego listening to your cd's when you move to streaming, rip them to streamer internal drives or NAS. You then back up those files via something like RAID, so two drive NAS, second drive is copy of first drive. And then I have a copy of the copy via usb drive, so three drives would have to fail for me to lose my over 3.5k rips. Another possible advantage of this is cd rips may have better sound quality vs cd's with transport, mine did with the subsequent transports used after my ML No. 37 died.

Disc drives do wear out over time.  I recently went through a lot of effort to replace the pickup in my Sony XA5400ES (w/VSE mods) which is still a great sounding player.  

It’s hard to tell how much use a previously owned player has had or how much life is left in the pick-up.  So, there is a risk buying used.  Perhaps keep your search to players manufactured in the last 5 years?

Another poster recommended Esoteric which makes highly regarded disc players.  If I couldn’t get my Sony fixed I planned to get a Marantz SACD 30N which also supports streaming.