4 years would be an unusually short production run for a dCS product. I would guess that on dCS’ past record that suggests up to another 3-4 years before it is replaced. Vivaldi as flagship ( now 7-8 years old) will no doubt be the first to replaced. When that happens dCS’ manufacturing capacity will be skewed for some time towards serving the demand created which is one reason why it takes years for them to work through replacing all of the lines. They are not Sony or Matsushita. Another example: Debussy came out in 2011 and was replaced by Bartok as the entry level DAC in 2019, 8 years later.
One further thought. When it happens will the Rossini replacement feature a CD drive? Is there the market demand for one in today’s environment where streaming is king? IMO there is no guarantee that such a drive will be offered as part of a one box product.
If I was in your position I would go for that offer from your dealer unless you want a long wait.
To be honest I cannot answer your question. I have never heard Bartok and the last time that I heard Rossini was in Munich in 2017 where I was unable to give it much attention as I was mainly talking with dCS outside of the demonstration area. So I overheard it rather than heard it. I do remember my friend who was seated inside listening to it coming out of the room to meet me and saying “Wow, I have never heard the Doors like that before!”. The only time that I have been able to give Rossini my full attention was with my dealer in 2016 but that was a comparison with Vivaldi ( no need to guess the outcome).
All I can say with confidence is that dCS ensure that each step up their range of products results in a clearly audible gain in sound quality ( and musical involvement). They have to do this as they sell via bricks and mortar dealers and the improvement must be clearly demonstrable.
I have had an answer from Dominik Hofer of ProJect Technical support.
The short answer is that you won’t be able to use wordclock sync on a ProJect transport with a non ProJect device. The two transports are specifically designed to work only with the respective DAC Box or Pre Box.
The way they work is as follows:
The CD Box RS functions as a master and has a wordclock output that sends the clock to the DAC Box or the Pre Box
The CD Box RS2 functions as a slave and has a wordclock input (through its HDMI connector) and it receives the clock from the DAC Box or the Pre Box.
Thanks Rudi. I can rule out Pro-Ject then. Interestingly my dCS dealer speculated the same on Pro-Ject and CEC, and asked me to keep using Arcam until I have budget for a dCS transport. I would not complain about that
Hi Ryan, I was looking through the latest print audio mags and the “News” ( or re-hashed press releases ) has news from Cambridge Audio. They say that their more upmarket ( and rather good looking) Evo range is to include a new CD transport later this year. No details but it could be a contender for a reasonably priced transport to go with your Bartok. No technical details yet. Given the prices of other components in the range I would guess that the UK price will be in the £2K range. Worth waiting for ?
No indeed , not currently as I expect it may be an autumn (I’m sorry ,must be professional), a Q4 release as the summer seems not an ideal launch period ( if people can go on holiday this year) but autumn catches the Christmas market. We shall see.
True. The Evo line is a lifestyle concept. It might sound great, but it’s optimized for convenience, functionality and looking great in your home as a simple system. The CD player would augment an all-in-one box. If there was a clock option the Evo 150 would likely already have it.
When I entered the dcs universe I firmly did so seeking an all-in-one solution to high quality streaming. CDs? What CDs? Who needs them anymore? or so I pondered with myself.
Until my wife wanted to listen to one of her CDs and all of the sudden I realized we had no CD player in the entire house. I think we have a blue ray player somewhere in a closet in the garage but I digress and not gonna bring it inside anyway. When I say her CDs I mean her CDs, performances. She’s a classical musician and has bootleg recordings of her own concerts and rehearsals so not going to find those on streaming services. Studio and official concert recordings, yes, but not her own takes.
This set me on a mission to find a good but cheap transport and I settled on a decade-old Bryston BCD-1 that connects to my Rossini via AES. I think it’s a fantastic choice, bullet proof just about, and using the good ole redbook only Philips transport of yore. Sure, it’s not in the same class as a legacy dcs product, but for what we need it it works fantastic!
This is a modest digression from OP’s original post, but depending on one’s actual goal, one could also consider something like the GeerFab D.BOB. It won’t address your desire for a high-quality CD transport to match with your dCS DAC per se; indeed, it is conceivably better than some of the alternatives discussed here, but it is an interesting and very cost-effective alternative for playing SACD and other hi-res discs. Or “low-res” for that matter. It won’t make your $199 Sony disc player into a Vivaldi transport, but you might be surprised at how good it will sound. I play almost zero silver discs. In my headphone rack, I have the MSB UMT & Select II, so if I want to, I can listen to a disc there, but truthfully, the primary use of the UMT is ripping SACDs. My disc player in my speaker system is actually the Oppo 205 in the home theater; with the D.BOB connected via HDMI, and then to the Vivaldi DAC via Toslink. SACD data [or any digital extract from disc] can be sent over to the Vivaldi DAC via Toslink, and they sound very good, much like ripping on the fly. I don’t think they sound quite as good as ripped files streamed locally likely due to clocking, but that may also be cognitive bias at work, and for non-critical listening, it sounds pretty darn good.
I have to chime in with the issue that I found with the D.BOB, namely that to properly sync with it you have to use Sync Mode “Audio” as it does not have a word clock input.
The D.BOB’s designer said that he is going to investigate adding a word clock input on a future revision of the product.
Absolutely correct. For me, I probably wouldn’t invest in the additional expense of a clocked D.BOB, but it would be a noteworthy option for new purchasers, and those with a large legacy disc collection that they actually play [rather than store, as I do].
I probably would go with a clocked D.BOB, and here’s why:
When I left it on Word Clock, the clock mismatch caused a constant “clicking” in the background of the audio.
However, even with the clicking, I could hear a wider and deeper soundstage than I did when I switched the input over to Audio mode.
That tells me the musical samples being processed that weren’t clicks still sounded better with the enhanced clocking, which is why I actually returned my D.BOB; the sonic degradation of having to use Audio mode made it not worthwhile for me to keep.
I get that. Since I don’t have a transport otherwise in my system, and I only use the Oppo/D.BOB for “exploratory” or guest/casual purposes, that degradation is sort of the reverse tradeoff for me: worth it for the convenience. If I like a disc enough to want to keep it, or acquire it, it will soon be a file on the Roon server anyway.
That’s why I went for the Rossini Player; it was worth it to go that route rather than get the DAC and a third party CD transport, plus I loved what I heard from the RP I demoed.
) has news from Cambridge Audio. They say that their more upmarket ( and rather good looking) Evo range is to include a new CD transport later this year. No details but it could be a contender for a reasonably priced transport to go with your Bartok. No technical details yet. Given the prices of other components in the range I would guess that the UK price will be in the £2K range. Worth waiting for ?
