Rossini Transport - noticable sound of disc spinning while playing SACDs

Hi Phil @Phil

To let you know my dealer has already picked up the unit from my house 2 days back. It may be already in dCS USA service center.

Thanks for all you support.

Regards,
Sourav

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Hi Sourav,

Thanks, yes, your dealer, dCS USA and I are all in contact to make sure that your RTT is handled as a priority.

BR

Phil

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Sourav, I for one will be very interested to learn the result of this investigation. Would you describe - I don’t think you have done this in your earlier posts - the nature of the sound you are hearing from the transport? For example, is it high pitched (which is my experience of the mechanism in the dCS Puccini player), or more of a low-ish humming sound (my experience of the Rossini with SACDs)? The two mechanisms are entirely different of course, I’m just using them as contrasting examples.

@Simon_C

Simon, the experiences I am having with my Rossini Transport are -

  1. When a SACD is played, there is a spinning sound which is loud enough to hear from up to 3-4 ft away from the unit when the volume of the pre-amp is set to up to 40 % of typical listening volume range. If u focus u can hear it even from around 6 ft distance (my typical listening position). The sound is very irritating when u r playing a song which has some quiet passage in the middle of it.

  2. One can also hear a spinning sound when CD (or CD layer of the same SACD) is played. But that can be ignored. You will not hear it with 0 or 30% volume range unless u take your ears close to the unit.

Regards,
Sourav

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This is a known problem, which I personally experienced. Part of the issue (in my limited understanding, and feel free to correct) is that dCS was for many years dependent on another company’s IP/manufacturing for transports (Esoteric?).

In any event, IMHO, the days of the perceived SQ gap between pure digital source playback and spinning disk playback are numbered.

I kind od agree that there should not be any SQ difference in both the routes if done correctly.

But playing digital files from a server over ethernet ( I shall not go for async usb route at all) has so many components involved (and there by can be weak link) that to me instead using a good transport I found to be more convenient and predictable.

And for this very reason I suspect transports would continue to he supported by hi end audio brands.

Regards,
Sourav

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Not trying to persuade you either way @sourav. I personally love physical media. But, this solution, implemented by some on this forum (including me), was very compelling:

Roon Nucleus–>Ethernet
Rossini DAC/Vivaldi Upsampler–>Ethernet

Done!

Fun: I asked chat GPT what external streamer it would recommend for Rossini. Answer: Aurender W20SE :laughing:

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That is funny. Then you would have a music server that costs more than the Rossini APEX DAC.

Fortunately for us lowly humans, it looks like we have not yet reached AI singularity (!) ; )

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Esoteric transports were/are only used in the Vivaldi SACD transport. The Rossini SACD transport uses a cheaper, and still current one. Not sure of the vendor, Stream Unlimited? Denon/Marantz?

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Read somewhere that they use Denon transports (stereophile?).

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yes, found it- it was on their “Recommended Components 2023”:

dCS Rossini SACD Transport: $26,500
Unlike the earlier Rossini Player, which only played CDs, the Rossini Transport uses a new mechanism from Denon that plays both SACDs and CDs. The Transport outputs audio data on twin AES/EBU links, to allow it to send native DSD data and CD data upsampled to DXD, DSD, or double DSD (these both encrypted) to a dCS DAC. JA used the Transport with a Rossini DAC and was mightily impressed by what he heard. He consistently preferred the sound of SACDs played on the Transport compared with the same data sent to the Rossini DAC over his network, feeling that the low frequencies sounded more robust. “Once these words have been laid out on the pages of this issue,” JA concluded, “I’ll have to return [the Rossini Transport] to dCS. It breaks my heart.” (Vol.42 No.5 WWW)

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Yeah, the VRDS Mark-3 Mech on the Vivaldi Transports. I believe the SilverStrike JPL-2800 CD Mech on the Rossini Player, and the D+M Mech (not Denon per se I believe) on the Rossini Transport (don’t know the exact model though).

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I believe it’s the SACD-M3 though it is possible that the OEM version has a different identifier. I remain impressed with its performance in the Rossini Transport.

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It says a tremendous amount that dCS does not own its own transport technology. Businesses nearly always own or acquire technologies they view as critical to their mission. Ferrari does not outsource the engine.

The core of a transport is its disc mechanism. Three years ago, when dCS launched the Rossini Player, the Esoteric mechanism they’d used in the Puccini had been discontinued, along with the necessary chipset from Sony. The only mechanism available to them was the CD-only Silverstrike, from StreamUnlimited, in Vienna. However, according to dCS Americas’ John Quick, in 2017 the main man at dCS’s Japanese distributor, who is also the president of the Tokyo Audio Society, told dCS that both Pioneer and Denon were looking to introduce OEM mechanisms that would play both SACDs and CDs. dCS tested them and found the Denon mechanism more appropriate, from the standpoints of both performance and interface. But because the Denon was too big to retrofit into the Rossini Player, dCS opted to bring to market the Rossini Transport.

From:

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Miguel, I’m not so sure. It seems to me that those examples of streaming and their known problems have little to do with properly implemented network audio (such as dCS), which is quite different from streaming into SPDIF or USB. And neither of those examples support your assertion that sometimes your Cambridge player beats streaming (as a physicist, ask yourself why that should be “sometimes”). And none of this rebuts what has been mentioned elsewhere that two identical data streams from discs and streamer should not sound different if they are processed identically by the DAC in identical signal paths. This isn’t about 1s and 0s. That’s an old red herring. This is about actually getting down to what might be different between two signal paths.

I’ve owned transports for my PS Audio gear, and my MSB gear. These were transports made by the two firms respectively, definitely with Oppo drive in the case of MSB (though I am not sure which drive the PS Audio contained). It is possible the PS Audio transport sounded slightly better than their network renderer. I believe McGowan wrote a post at one time explaining why that might be case, and IIRC, it was related to the different paths that the bits were processed in the DAC. I think it might have also had something to do with the various network cards that PSA used over time. Short explanation: the signal paths were different.

I agree that a properly designed and optimized transport connected directly to the DAC over I2S can in fact sound better than a network interface if the latter has not been properly optimized. That’s what’s wrong with all these “discs sound better or network sounds better” subjective comparisons: few of us actually seem to know if we are comparing apples to apples.

If the DAC maker short-changes either interface compared to the other, it is quite possible that the signal paths are different in some audible way. That seems pretty simple to me. But it doesn’t support a flat assertion that one medium is better than the other.

I’ve listened to a Rossini transport and compared it to Rossini network. It was not a blind comparison, but it was over the course of several hours. I could detect no difference, but it was also not the focus of my listening session. In contrast, as good as the combo of my Oppo 205 and the GeerFab DBOB were, they weren’t even close to the same tracks ripped from the SACDs. (No surprise there; I think it makes the point.) I’ve listened to my MSB Transport compared to the MSB network renderer. It’s a close call, but I like the network renderer better. That same MSB transport has ripped the majority of my SACDs, the files from which of course sound great through either the MSB or dCS stack.

I agree with you that the ear can hear things we might not even know to measure or how to measure. But that shouldn’t keep us from hypothesizing about where the the differences our ears/brains are hearing might be originating. If there is a difference in sound between the playback of a disc, and the playback of the same bits of a file from that disc, that difference is IMHO probably in the equipment between the source and the speakers, not in differences between sources.

I know some people enjoy handling physical media, and I respect that completely. I’m the opposite. I can’t wait to get those discs ripped, stored, and out of my way. And I wouldn’t be surprised if those two different POVs contributed to our differential sense of enjoying the music itself. That one might be harder to measure. :wink:

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Silver disc transports are not a core part of dCS’ business. I doubt that more than a couple of handfuls of Rossini Transports are made annually. I hope you appreciate how small dCS is. Transports are nice to have but the business core is expressed in the company name ; Data Conversion Systems. For that they own the intellectual property.

Companies making audiophile ( and non-audiophile) CD/SACD players have always used outsourced transports made by a few large companies in the far east ( since Philips in the Netherlands pulled out). In 2023 the remaining number of suppliers is limited.The investment to manufacture from scratch is too large.If this is news to you read this and see how many companies make or made their own transport mechanisms:

https://www.dutchaudioclassics.nl/the_complete_d_a_dac_converter_li

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This is such a strange way to address a person you don’t know.

No, Pete, it’s not news to me.

In fact, it supports exactly the point I was trying to make: if dCS viewed this as a core technology it would have likely brought it in-house. It clearly doesn’t see it that way.

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What I find more amazing than how few companies actually make disc transports is that they are not compatible with each other.

I would have thought the industry would have long ago settled upon a command interface that would have made whether you use a Denon, Esoteric, Panasonic, Philips, StreamUnlimited or Sony transport no bigger an issue than which brand of hard drive you purchase, but instead even different transport lines within a manufacturer’s range cannot be substituted for one another. :man_shrugging:

So for example, though you can plug and play most any CD-R drive into your computer and it will just work, you can’t do the same for a dedicated CD player.

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