CD Player Modifications. Is it worth the ?

Aroc. I believe the XC-30M was the first. Stan Warren replaces the toslink in favor of his own designed setup. Mine is the XC-35M, but I have a new unmodified XC-37M in the closet as a back-up. They recently stopped making the XC-37M. I wonder if they will make a new model?

If you run to eBay someone is selling off some left over new XC-37M. The link is:

http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1330987248

I have spoken to Stan Warren on a number of occassions and he believes in his work. You need to have a Pioneer or Onkyo DVD player with the Burr Brown 24/96 or higher DAC. I cannot believe he would downplay what he does. If Stan did say something similar to what Sean is relating, he may have been comparing his modded Pioneer against a $2500+ player. (He has said such to me, but did not feel they were much better). So you can spend $450 for a Pioneer DVD player modded by Stan or spend $2500+ for something better; it is your money.

I have both a Pioneer DV333 in one system and a MSB Link DAC modded by Stan in another. If was worth more than every penny.

"Mods" very much understates what Stan really does. He redesigns large portions of the original circuit, removing bugs and design oversights, and upgrades the parts quality of the most
important components. He can be reached at (541)344-3696

Dan Wright at www.modwright.com does similar work.

The following is a link of a comparison of Stan's DVD player and a Camelot Morganna player. There is also lots of comments on Stan at the Chicago Audio Society website archives of meetings, etc. A Stan modded MSB Link DAC is their reference player.

http://decware.com/forums/General/posts/2403.html

http://www.chicagoaudio.org/

I'd like to add to my post above, that I also have the Stan modified Aiwa to go with my Stan MSB Link II. Greggstraley, you may want to note that I recently tried running it with the MSB P1000 power base and felt it took another step up in authority accross the whole frequency range.

Thanks for the note on the DVD player. I will try the sand bag with my DV333 in the other system. A sand bag worked well back when I owned the original Cambridge CD4.