Claiming you make a “great” transport today is like claiming you make the “best” horse drawn carriage in 1908 (in New York City, later/earlier elsewhere).
What will undo the transport is not lack of engineering acumen, or its appreciation/affinity by audiophiles like me (or you?). Eventually the large music studios will simply stop producing CDs.
IMHO, this is why dCS will never own or manufacture its own transport mechanism.
dCS has never owned its own Transport mech, from the very beginning, and even when CDs were a roaring business. They were Sony, Esoteric, StreamUnlimited (ex Philips Transport folks), and now D+M.
dCS’ disc Transport tends to be more than just the physical CD/SACD spinner/reader. The Vivaldi Transport for example has built-in Upsampling, transcoding, encryption, etc.
Not sure I understand the fixation on whether the drive mech is OEM or in-house. dCS’ “engine” are the Ring DAC and digital signal processing, not mechanical disc spinning 
Hi @Anupc, I agree with you. The broader point I was trying–apparently unsuccessfully!–to make is that dCS doesn’t really invest in the transport product.
If Ring DACs were failing across the product line that would be a “five alarm fire,” b/c is one of the core products/technologies that dCS has developed. In contrast, if one has a problem with a loud transport mechanism, as I did, and many others have mentioned, and apparently as @sourav has now, it’s a different level of priority.
Yeah, it’s a pity you can’t even find a high-end turntable these days. 
Yep, just like they stopped making LPs in the 1990s.
If they stop making CDs in 2024, I can’t wait to start buying major label CDs again in 2035. 
@Anupc Anup Rossini Transport also has built in Upsampling.
Not sure about ‘transcoding and encryption’ - what exactly you meant by these two in the context of transport ?
Regards,
Sourav
@PAR I have also owned PS Audio’s Direct Stream Transport and Direct Steram Dac. And also I have trailed their new SACD Transport. In both cases the transport sounded better (may be because they have used two different kinds of interfaces). And that’s one of the reasons when I decided to upgrade to dCS I also wanted to have Rossini Transport.
You are right, if the processing interface for data coming through i2s or over ethernet are same (and if we ignore the difference due to the underlying transport protocol used, ethernet vs i2s; which I am not sure if we can) then rest depends on the signal path.
In my experience, ensuring the reliability of that signal path in case of using transport is much more simple (just because one has to just connect the transport to the dac).
In contrast to that, ethernet based streaming from a music server, relies on many s/w and h/w components - the Music Server processor/memory, the music server s/w implementation (upnp vs proprietary as in case of Roon), meta data management layer (say in case of Roon one can run Roon core in a separate server with different h/w than the music server ), type of storage (SSD vs regular drive with different iops), router, network cable, power supply of the music server, etc. One can easily go wrong selecting one or more of these components and keep on wondering where is the bottleneck if the sound quality is not up to the mark.
Regards,
Sourav
True, that they don’t invest in disc mechs specifically, but no doubt it takes quite a bit of R&D investment to incorporate an OEM part like that into the overall Transport platform. I disagree that dCS treats Transport issues with a different level of priority. What gives you that impression?
dCS Dealers have a key part to play in providing the appropriate level 1 support. When I had a problem with my Vivaldi Transport tray belt - the one and only issue I encountered in 10 years of daily use (touchwood) - my dealer took care of it immediately. In Sourav’s case, it sure looks like his dealer was asleep at the wheel until prodded by dCS.
Upsampling to DXD, or transcoding redbook disc into DSD/2. Sending it out over dual-AES, Encrypted or as DoP to your DAC, etc., all within the Transport itself - I’m not sure about the Rossini Transport, but the Vivaldi Transport has a whole Control Board exactly the same as in the DAC itself, so it’s pretty powerful.
Anup thanks for the clarification.
In Rossini Transport too all those features are available. I compared the manual of Vivaldi and Rossini transport and functionality wise I have not found any difference except 2 sdif (ch 1 and ch2) outputs and track/disc remaining timing .
Regards,
Sourav
One can easily go wrong, I agree, especially if one doesn’t understand what one is doing, but it is also not difficult at all to do it right. I also agree that plugging a company’s transport into that company’s DAC is much simpler than the initial effort required to establish a reliable network and network connection. [But just from my POV, the two efforts are almost diametrically opposed. You don’t invest in a network in order to duplicate transport functionality. You do it for something different. And vice versa. One being easier than the other is probably pretty low on the heirarchy.]
But networking is not rocket science any more, if it ever was. Many server/streamers (like the Roon Nucleus) border on plug & play. One can make it as complicated—and potentially more error-prone—as one wants, but that’s a choice. A proper network is not difficult, and the delivery of those bits into the DAC (or Bridge or Upsampler) then places the onus on the DAC maker to have a proper network interface.
Apologies for this digression on a thread about transport mechanical noise. We can debate elsewhere–and have at length! 
—what things on a network can affect audio quality. Cheers! 
You Can find lots of great high end turntables, but, alas, no “great” horse drawn carriages.
This analogy misses the mark. I was not arguing that LPs do not have advantages over digital recordings. They do, namely (often) being an analogue recording (unless pressed after DSD/DXD recording/mixing).
In contract, CDs have no such advantage. They are simply a storage device of the bits, just like a thumb drive might carry a PDF file. No one would reasonably claim that the same PDF file on a thumb drive is better/different/higher resolution than the same file in PDF format emailed. Spinning the thumb drive around thousands of times per second also won’t change that. Any “perceived” gap between spinning things around to get the bits, and delivering them over a network has either closed completely, or is rapidly closing, depending on who you ask.
Interesting static: Less than 10% of US population under 35 bought a CD last year. Graph depicting CD sales below. As demand and production collapse, transport is dead. That doesn’t mean there won’t be a few audiophiles still alive who swear by them, and if that is your “bag”, enjoy! : )
This is always the argument used when it’s argued that USB can’t sound different from Ethernet and Ethernet cables make no difference.
No one is disputing the bits are different, the question is how do electrical noise and other factors come into play?
CD transports do sound different than playback of files, but which you prefer is largely an element of preference.
I don’t stream and I don’t play files; any time I’m listening to an album from digital I am playing a silver disc.
The same could be said about digital vs. LP, but the difference is still there. Arguably those differences is what this hobby is all about or we’d all be listening to Sony Blu-ray players and have an extra $30K - $125K in the bank.
Plot vinyl LP sales from 1984 - 2000 sometime.
Yes, I’m happily outside the “under 35” demographic, but when I buy music, I buy vinyl or a CD.
I do not stream - I do not have a Tidal or Qobuz account - or purchase files except on rare occasion from the Apple Music store.
In fact, I’ve probably purchased more CDs - sadly for the record companies, almost all used pre-1991 CDs to avoid the loudness war “remasters” - in the past two years than I had for the decade preceding.
I just paid $22 for a used copy of the 1990 CD of Supertramp’s …famous last words… because newer versions of the CD are horrifically brick-wall compressed, as is the case for most “remastered” CDs (and digital files, including those available at HDTracks. Some of the most over-compressed tracks I own are sadly 96/24 “high res” files from HD Tracks because they are more than happy to sell you whatever garbage the record labels send them as long as they can call them “high resolution.”)
I will continue to do so, as streaming gives you zero control over your music - when a label replaces a wonderful sounding older album with a highly compressed remaster, they just replace the title with the new one in their catalog - and when you purchase files you have no recourse when you download the file and the result looks like a rectangle filled in in a child’s coloring book.
FWIW:
(Top, all currently available digital versions of Supertramp’s It’s Raining Again; the bottom is from that 1990 CD.)
Note none of my comments are meant to imply that a robust underground for CD transports will arise as was the case for turntables, but hopefully someone will keep churning them out for those of us with thousands of silver discs we will never stop playing when we want to hear music and don’t play those black plastic things with grooves.
What CD transport do you use?
I own a Rossini Player (APEX).
Wall Street Journal: Horse-Drawn Carriages Fetch Luxury-Car Prices
Hi @BillK ,
Thanks for providing that graph. FWIW, I don’t stream either, and don’t have a Qobuz or Tidal account (though I am not opposed to the former, and will Never have the latter).
I try to meticulously research the disks too, and will buy some occasionally and burn, then resell at a loss. I keep everything saved on a Roon nucleus, which has a solid state drive and is fanless.
The differences you illustrate in the file comparison will be evident if you digitize the 1990 CD and do the same comparison.
Each of us makes our own choices around playback, and I’m certainly not criticizing yours. I used to have thousands of disks myself, stacked to the ceiling in my apartment.
Then two things happened: (a) (returning to the original point of this thread), like @sourav, I could Hear my Puccini transport over soft passages in the music, ruining the listening experience; and (b) I realized that All of that plastic chaos could now fit in uncompressed form on a thumb drive (or two) in the palm of my hand. (Leaving aside 90x that same volume in material and energy waste in making it).
For me that made it an easy choice to go the digital route. Many others are making this choice, as evidenced in the CD sales data, and IMHO, this will continue to put pressure on transport availability and cost.
Also, good research on the carriages–are you in the market? ; )
Cheers,
R
I completely agree on the loudness war’s bad effect on “remastered” albums.
As for HDTracks, they don’t have a choice of file or a say on how the publisher produces the files, they are just selling you what’s available because people want that.
The future availability of CD (and especially SACD) transports should be concerning for anyone that swears by physical disc playback. Comparing these to LP playback is missing a key point.
Designing and manufacturing the laser assembly and associated controller circuitry is incredibly expensive, and once the likes of Sony decide is no longer profitable these will disappear forever.
Small firms kept turntables and cartridges alive because these can be built by a guy in a garage with some patience and skill.
A better comparison for CD transports would be high end cassettes. The knowledge on how to make a nakamichi tape head is basically lost forever. These will never be produced again. Same for type 4 cassettes. The tooling is gone and the environmental impact too large to ever restart production.
I think we’re still pretty far away from this happening for CD (thank you Japan for your love of physical media), but the day will come!
Companies like Esoteric, Accuphase, TEAC are investing in transports again (at least they bring out new models). Not sure about this but I think that SACDs are a big thing in Japan.
Isn’t the world full of interesting and amazing ironies: the developed country with perhaps the highest population density in the world, where space is critical and very expensive, invests in physical media! : )
