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  3. 1068591903

transport sound quality of good modern CDPs

Used to be they made big heavy expensive CD transports that improved the sound out of your DAC over a standard CDP transport section. Very few are made anymore, yet there are plenty of good outboard DACs on the market. The better one-box CDPs can often sound as good as redbook allows, yet most seem to use generic off-the-shelf ho-hum transport mechanics with maybe a little tweaking to the servo circuitry. So my question is two-fold:

1) Have the lightweight seemingly modest transports in excellent sounding $2-4K CDPs gotten good enough that their mfgs feel their sound can't be significantly improved by using a near-industrial-grade transport?

2) Would there be a notable sound difference by running the digital output of say a Musical Fidelity A308 CDP into a $5K outboard DAC vs running a Levinson No 37 transport into the same DAC? Or for that matter, a Rega Planet or NAD C541i?
sdecker

Showing 1 response by brawny

brawny
51 posts
 
Hi Sdecker,

I'm currently looking for a decent transport to run into my Art Audio Gil Elise DAC. Coincidentally, I was considering the Musical Fidelity 308 because of it's very low jitter and the fact it uses a Sony drive in lieu of the unreliable Phillips' drives. I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet. Can you give me your impressions of the 308. Does it have any problems reading CDR's and CDR's over 74 minutes? I've been using a friend's Vecteur CD-player as a transport and have been pretty impressed but it sometimes has disc reading problems. Don't know if the Musical Fidelity would be any better. Any info woud be greatly appreciated!
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