The last thing I would spend a lot of money on right now is an expensive transport, unless the money's not that big a deal to you. If you really feel like your transport is limiting your playback potential, I'd go with a new all-in-one player. But we're not far from a new way of serving up digital music (analog, of course, is a completely different story) - the fact that getting the information from the transport to the DAC is so problematic is an after-effect of the outdated technology used for CD's. Some sort of memory-based storage system isn't far off - imagine a CD player that reads the whole CD into RAM before clocking it into the DACs. If you can copy whole CDs error free, you could design a player to read the whole thing into RAM error free. 700MB of RAM isn't that expensive anymore, so there isn't a financial barrier to making a mid-to-high end player like this. Or you'll have a music server far, far away from your system, but connected via ethernet and stream your music collection error free. A company like Tact with their RCS devices can become a software company, at least for this product line. There's no technical reason why this functionality should cost more than a copy of Excel in the future. -Kirk
Why upgrade transport???
My front end is a Pioneer PD65 used as a transport via illuminati D60 to an Assemblage D2D-1 jitter reducer/upsampler, via I2Se cable to an Assemblage DAC 3.0, which has upgrades including the Burr Brown DF1704 24/96 filter and OPA 627 op amps. The rest of my system is run balanced out of the 3.0.
My question is, since the D2D-1 does both reclocking and upsampling to 24/96, would there be any benefit to a transport upgrade, and what could I expect? I was looking at a moderate upgrade such as to the Sonic Frontiers SFT, or maybe a Meridian. The setup will be used only for CD music, and not for SACD or DVD.
As a second option, are there relatively simple mods to the PD65, which would provide a sonically better front end, such as disconecting the D/A portion of the circuitry, improving the power cord, sound coat, or others?
As always, thanks for your comments and help,
Tim
My question is, since the D2D-1 does both reclocking and upsampling to 24/96, would there be any benefit to a transport upgrade, and what could I expect? I was looking at a moderate upgrade such as to the Sonic Frontiers SFT, or maybe a Meridian. The setup will be used only for CD music, and not for SACD or DVD.
As a second option, are there relatively simple mods to the PD65, which would provide a sonically better front end, such as disconecting the D/A portion of the circuitry, improving the power cord, sound coat, or others?
As always, thanks for your comments and help,
Tim