2. digital
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Why upgrade transport???

My front end is a Pioneer PD65 used as a transport via illuminati D60 to an Assemblage D2D-1 jitter reducer/upsampler, via I2Se cable to an Assemblage DAC 3.0, which has upgrades including the Burr Brown DF1704 24/96 filter and OPA 627 op amps. The rest of my system is run balanced out of the 3.0.

My question is, since the D2D-1 does both reclocking and upsampling to 24/96, would there be any benefit to a transport upgrade, and what could I expect? I was looking at a moderate upgrade such as to the Sonic Frontiers SFT, or maybe a Meridian. The setup will be used only for CD music, and not for SACD or DVD.

As a second option, are there relatively simple mods to the PD65, which would provide a sonically better front end, such as disconecting the D/A portion of the circuitry, improving the power cord, sound coat, or others?

As always, thanks for your comments and help,

Tim
mitch2
sfstereo
215 posts
 
The Pioneer PD65 is a very good transport and it was used by Wadia and Theta. If you are planning to buy a used transport, check with the manufacturer to see if they still have spare transport parts. Philips stopped making the transport that's used in the Sonic Frontiers SFT1 a couple of years ago.
gs5556
1,218 posts
 
A transport does not send out "1's and 0's" -- what it does is take the digital information off a CD and convert it into an electrical signal that is REPRESENTATIVE of the digital stream of "1's and 0's". This signal is then routed to the DAC in a manner just like any other audio electrical signal.

Therefore, the quality of the transport is dependent on the same thing as other components, namely the quality of the power supply, filtering caps, voltage regulators, signal path resistors, caps etc. And of course, the higher the design and build quality, the more expensive.

Yes, the transport affects sound quality and upgrading a transport can have more than a subjective benefit. I also agree it is the most important component of a digital front end.
kthomas
911 posts
 
The last thing I would spend a lot of money on right now is an expensive transport, unless the money's not that big a deal to you. If you really feel like your transport is limiting your playback potential, I'd go with a new all-in-one player. But we're not far from a new way of serving up digital music (analog, of course, is a completely different story) - the fact that getting the information from the transport to the DAC is so problematic is an after-effect of the outdated technology used for CD's. Some sort of memory-based storage system isn't far off - imagine a CD player that reads the whole CD into RAM before clocking it into the DACs. If you can copy whole CDs error free, you could design a player to read the whole thing into RAM error free. 700MB of RAM isn't that expensive anymore, so there isn't a financial barrier to making a mid-to-high end player like this. Or you'll have a music server far, far away from your system, but connected via ethernet and stream your music collection error free. A company like Tact with their RCS devices can become a software company, at least for this product line. There's no technical reason why this functionality should cost more than a copy of Excel in the future. -Kirk
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