You might have seen a post the other day on this cd transport from myself, anyway decided to get one and see how it goes.
Billet alloy machined out and just the bottom screwed on.
Aes out.
Clock input that you can configure, so the vivaldi clock should work fine with it.
It doesn’t obviously play SACD’s but i haven’t got any, so not bothered about that.
Can upgrade with a separate power supply if you dont want to use the built in one.
But the best bit is the price, £500
Will obviously let you know how i get on with it once it’s here.
Very interested to hear about it when you get it Duncan. Was contemplating getting one myself. I do have some SACDs so would have to rip those if I move in that direction.
I have high hopes for it as i ticks all the boxes for me and my digital set up.
Reviews so far look positive on it.
Not sure what transport it uses, but they make their own Self-developed P.A.S.S. (Precision Access Servo System).
So hopefully it will knock my old sony cdp-x 3000es out as transport only.
As i said yesterday the quality looks and feels nice, even the packaging is nice.
It’s rather heavy for It’s size and certainly not going to move about. The buttons are also nice to use along with the puck and lid.
It was very easy to set up. Clock settings set to 44.1 and 75 ohm’s as you can also set it to accept different frequencies.
You get a symbol on the screen once its locked on.
So playing a few cd’s right now and so far it’s working as it should and sounding fine.
I will test it against streaming and stored music from the melco, but for now it’s just fun time.
But for less than £500 i don’t think you could ask for amy more really and to be fair it’s probably more like a £2k transport or more.
Its certainly feels a much nicer product than the pro ject i tried.
I am hoping that the clock sync makes the difference with this one over the others i have tried and sent back.
Got to say so far i am very pleased with this.
Been playing one after another cd and it hasn’t missed a beat, it obviously shouldn’t, but i am sometimes a bit paranoid especially due to it’s price, etc.
But so far i will stick my neck out and say it’s well worth the out lay.
It has all the features i wanted as i dont own an SACD’s.
Had my best mate over yesterday for a look and listen. We pick a few cd’s out and compared them to streaming and ripped/stored of the same cd playing.
Well it was certainly interesting as it started off with my mate preferring the cd the most, then ripped and streaming last. But mainly not much in it, but different all the same.
In the end i played malia and boris blank cd and then compared it with the others.
All setting remained the same on the dac and upsampler.
To start with once again he liked the cd best, rip next and streaming last. Her voice being the biggest difference with the streaming version sounding to me slight more airer and light.
But as we compared more and i hot my mate to close his eyes so he didn’t know what was the source, things changed and in the end he went to picking streaming first, then cd and ripped last.
I think this just about sums up what i have always thought really, once you play digital music from any good source through a very good dac it all pretty much sounds the same.
The fact that in the space of a few minutes you can completely do a u turn says it all.
But i am very happy with this cd player, i know i don’t really need it, but at the same time it’s nice to have. It also a good reminder to how good streaming has become if you get it right.
£500 for this still a bargin, plus i am only using a cheap aes cable and the nuilt in power supply. You can run it with a separate power supply if you wish, plus maybe more performance from it if you do, plus i could get a better aes cable and clock cable to more match what i use in the system, but for now i will continue as i am
Thanks Duncan. That generally sums it up; biases colour what folks think they hear, but blind testing exposes things.
If you look at the internal architecture of dCS platforms, if the actual source data is identical, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s an online streaming source (HTTP), a locally ripped track (UPnP/Roon RAAT), or a CD Transport (AES), once the track data stream gets past the dCS platform input stage and is stripped of all transport framing into raw PCM, they’re identical I²S streams flowing into the FPGAs for further processing.
So, if one ensures the inputs are correctly clocked and error-free, then they will sound the same and be indistinguishable from one another because they are identical.
All I can say is, if you are after a cd transport to connect to your dCS dac then i don’t feel you will be disappointed with this.
Even if it was £2K or more i don’t think you would feel disappointed. The fact that this is £500 new really is a bargain.
Yes i would obviously like a vivaldi transport sitting in my rack, but in all honesty i can’t see the value it that for me at all as if i did i would have got one a long time ago.
It would certainly be interesting trying this against the vivaldi transport to see how much better it is over this, especially given the huge difference in price.
Anup, do you see anything incorrect about this conclusion from your statement above re “correctly clocked and error free”?
If:
(1) A system’s timing is governed by an external clock (let’s say a Vivaldi clock as an example)
AND
(2) One has a transport that transfers the 1’s and 0’s in an error free manner (a low bar in 2025)
Then the Vivaldi one offers no sonic advantage over any other transport meeting the criteria in (2) above. What do you think?
By correctly clocked, I meant the CD Transport has a Clock input port and is slaved to the same clock as the DAC. As opposed to using a CD Transport without a Clock input port and the DAC has to be slaved to the incoming AES stream.
As for (1) and (2), I’m not sure there’s enough information in either statements to conclude whether the Vivaldi One offers no sonic advantage. Did you mean, say, Vivaldi One VS. CD Transport (properly clocked) + Vivaldi DAC?
As for “error free”, it’s slightly more complicated, and takes a little more effort to validate.
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