Resolving CD Transports Crowd Sourcing

Congradulstions.

There is nothing fishy here. My dealer had a close relationship with owner at the time and heard about this straight from him. ( my friend is very savvy in manufacturing and has good EQ, so he was not being deceived.

Audio Research keeps a stock of parts to service discontinued products. Many very very old products can still be serviced. It is one of the many reasons to own ARC products.

I own a Ref CD9SE and have no worries at all. Also, had I not owned it when it was discontinued, I would have unhesitatingly bought one. Now, if it was made by a lessor company, I might hesitate.

@jafant 

+1 ARC CD9 / SE

OP,

I recommend signing up for the free month of Qubuz. My dealer pestered me for the better part of a year to switch fro Tidal to Qobuz. I finally did a couple years ago and cancelled my Tidal subscription within a couple days.
 

While there is only a slight difference in the basic sound of the two services with the exact same recording… Qobuz has well over one half million high resolution albums Tidal only has something like 50K… MQA pretty much sound like red book. 
 

OP,

Thanks for your impressions. I use my Ref CD as a DAC 99% of the time streaming with my Aurrender. The higher resolution of much of the material from Qubuz sounds better and the CD is there as a backup in case the network goes down.

For a little perspective, I owned a Sim Moon 760D CD / DAC with the Sim Moon 820 power supply ($18K together) for a number of years. My dealer brought over an Audio Research REF CD9SE without me asking. Holy cow, it is sooo much more natural and musical without loosing detail, it took me all of about 10 seconds to suspect and 30 more seconds to open my iPad and send a message to my audio dealer to order me one… I would have to figure out how to pay for it later… it just completely blew away the Moon for me.

I happily own a Audio Research Ref CD9SE. An absolutely wonderful DAC and CDPlayer. I compared it with a Berkeley Reference Alpha DAC ($22K) for a couple weeks and the difference was miniscule… the ARC was a tiny warmer and the Berkeley a tiny more detailed. I was prepared to buy the Berkeley… but surprisingly the ARC sounded better to me.