Aurender Music Server and CD Transport comparison

I'm afraid that I can't provide a good answer to your question but I have some experience that might be helpful.

I have a Jay's CD3 MKIII transport as well as a Teac VRDS 701. Before these I had a PSA PerfectWave Transport. I also have two DACs; a Berkeley Audio Reference Series II MQA with the Alpha USB and an Audio Mirror Tubadour IV. I stream using Qobuz through my ASUS ROG laptop into the Alpha USB/Reference II.

I have over 4K CDs that I have ripped to uncompressed FLAC. I usually play the CD because I'm a geezer who likes physical media (I also play LPs).

I have found that origin of digital music doesn't seem to make much difference in the sound. My two transports sound similar if not identical and when I compare a CD with the corresponding file on Qobuz I am hard pressed to tell the difference. If my PC is mangling the sound or adding noise I can't hear it. Someday I'll replace my PC with a streamer but I'm not going to spend a lot of money because I don't expect streamed music to sound better than playing a CD through one of my transports. From a technical standpoint it's hard to understand how a digital file that has been sliced and diced through the tortuous journey of the internet can sound better than playing a CD on a state of the art transport.

I have two transports because they have some significant differences. I have a collection of HDCDs and the Jay's Audio uses dither in the LSB where the HDCD information resides. My Berkeley decodes HDCDs so I need a different transport to play them. It also has MQA and it takes a special transport to play an MQA CD. The Teac transport passes all 16 bits cleanly and it will do the first unfold on an MQA CD and the Berkeley DAC does the rest.

I am at the age where I'm trying to do my last upgrade on each component. I had a horrible experience with the PSA transport which used a cheapo computer grade drive ($15 cd drive in a $4000 transport?) which failed repeatedly. I vowed that I would never buy another transport unless the manufacturer clearly stated what cd mechanism they were using. The Jay's uses the final generation of the Phillips transport and the Teac uses their own VRDS mechanism. Both of these transports will likely have a longer life than I will.

I can recommend either of these transports. The Jay's Audio is a sexy piece of gear. It is beautifully finished and the sliding door on top of the unit has a very nice feel. I love using it. It also upsamples to 176 kHz which can sound better on some DACs. The Jay's has several outputs including I2S so it can easily be hooked up to more than one DAC. The Teac is also very nice and if you think you might want to play MQA CDs it has that capability. It only has one Coax output.

Bottom line - in my experience the transport probably isn't going to be a big factor in whether or not a CD sounds better than your streamer. But if you play a fair amount of CDs the transport is the component that you most interact with. It is also the most prone to breakdown. For these reasons I am an advocate of buying the nicest transport you can afford. Pride of ownership is a big factor in this hobby and a good, smooth, quiet, reliable transport is a joy to use.

The PerfectWave Transport that I owned used an off-the-shelf computer grade drive. I forgot what brand it was but this information is available on PSA's forum. If you were willing to take the unit apart you could replace the drive with a standard $15 CD drive from Amazon. I don't know if other PSA models used an Oppo drive but the PerfectWave Transport certainly didn't (unless Oppo used an off-the-shelf rotgut computer drive that is not designed to spin music CDs). I may be wrong about this but I'm pretty sure that Oppo didn't make their own drive. There are only a few companies that manufacture CD drives that are designed for playing music. Phillips, Teac, Marantz, and a couple others. Most of the companies making CD players and transports source their drives from one of these manufacturers. The fact that PSA bought the cheapest drive they could find - one that was designed to spin up, read data, and spin down - instead of playing music for hour after hour, is unforgivable..

When PSA would no longer support the unit I decided to replace the drive myself (three drives had failed by then). The procedure was clearly spelled out in a PSA forum thread but it required the use of all-thread screws which you could get from PSA. I wrote an email but got no answer so I called and the guy told me that they no longer supported this model. I told him that I would put a new drive in myself but I needed the all-thread screws. He told me that they no longer had them. I said, "OK, then just tell me the specifications of the screws and I will buy them myself." He refused to even give me the specs on the screws.

Needless to say, I will never purchase anything from PS Audio again. Ever.