Resolving CD Transports Crowd Sourcing

I bought a Jay's CD3 Mk III a few months ago and I highly recommend it. It's massively well built and a pleasure to use. I have compared it to my Marantz KI Ruby SACD player's transport into my Berkeley Alpha Reference 2 DAC and I can't hear much difference. They both sound great. I think I can hear a slight improvement in soundstage when I use the 4X oversampling but it's very subtle.

I've got a Teac 701 on order from Music Direct. They show it as on backorder but I believe that Teac is not yet shipping this unit and I don't know when it will be available.

Why would I want a Teac transport as well as the Jay's audio? It turns out that the CD3 has a characteristic that is a downside for my situation. I collect HDCDs (the Alpha DAC decodes them) but the CD3 doesn't play them. It apparently uses dither on the first bit where the HDCD instructions are encoded. If you read the Stereophile review they note that the transport uses dither which is unusual. When you turn on the 4X oversampling it uses all the bits but that doesn't work for HDCD.

@thyname 

Very few people who buy a transport will care if it plays HDCDs but I wanted to point out the problem because a lot of people read these forums and maybe someone would benefit from knowing that. Berkeley makes the only current HDCD DACs that I know of but many vintage DACs and players have that feature. I also have a Krell KAV 250/2 player that has the HDCD feature.

I have to take issue with your comments about HDCD, however. There are a lot of titles that were recorded using HDCD and a bunch of my favorite artists used the format - Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Neil Young, Van Halen, Grateful Dead, Roxy Music, Dixie Chicks, kd Lang..... I could go on. Besides these well known artists there is a whole audiophile catalog on Reference Recordings that is HDCD encoded. There are also other audiophile labels such as Audio Fidelity and Audioquest that have released dozens of remastered tities using HDCD.

In my experience HDCD discs when played through top grade players and DACs typically sound significantly better than their regular counterparts. I've got 4 versions of CSN's CD including SACD and I like the HDCD version best. One of the reasons that HDCD sounds so good is because the Pacific Microsonic converters were pretty much the best of their time. Another reason is that the studios that invested in the Pacific Microsonics gear, which was expensive, tended to be the better studios staffed with the best engineers. The HDCD process itself gives a little more dynamic range and improves the sound as well. In nearly every case where I have the non-HDCD version vs. the HDCD version the HDCD sounds better. There are a few that I've compared that sound very similar but I've never heard an example where the HDCD is worse.

I have about two hundred HDCD titles out of a collection of around 4,000 CDs which is not a huge percentage but it is still significant. I actively collect HDCD titles because I like the sound of them and I have the equipment to decode them. I probably would have still purchased the Jay's Audio CD3 if I had known that it would not play HDCDs but I was disappointed to find this out after I bought it. It's such a nice piece of gear that will accept this particular fault.