Why Purchase A CD Player or Transport ?


I am 100% invested in vinyl, but want to improve my digital equipment chain.

Once I’ve upgraded my streaming equipment, why purchase a quality CD/SACD transport?

Is there a large enough subset of music that sounds better via optical media?

vonhelmholtz

Another +vote for my Players sounds better than anything Streamed.

 

Happy Listening!

I used to think that CD was better than using a streamer having a playback designs SCAD player and this was the case for some years. However I built a dedicated 2 box computer/streamer following the audiophilestyle forum for advice. It took a while and several builds to achieve a high quality result.

I play files from local storage on the computer which, from my experience, is of higher SQ than using streaming services although less convenient, having to rip CDs.

The eventual result easily equalled my vinyl set up (Kuzma XL, 4pt, Atlas, Ypsilon phono) sometimes surpassing it with modern digitally recorded music. The vinyl only raised the game with my 60s and 70s jazz albums and some older analogue recordings depending on their quality. Digitally recorded classical, especially hi-res, can sound stupendous.

I would say the steaming device is at least as important as the DAC used.

As mentioned above, I've ripped all my CDs and put them on shuffle..just over 100 hours of material.  I just received a Holo May DAC and wow..what an upgrade from my McIntosh MA12000 DAC.  The ripped CDs sound so musical.  Everything about the presentation is better.  I'm streaming off iFi Zen Stream/ Roon Core i7 NUC/64TB Synology DS1522+ with dual SSD Cache.  

@jafant 

I love your system venue… so clean. You have lots of players, what are you using to stream?