After buying a few CD box sets and trying to rip them, I gave up and, picked up one of these SMSL PL200t transports from Amazon: Here is the Good, Bad, Ugly and downright horrible.
The Good - seems to work flawlessly. It is perhaps the quietest, most vibration free transport i’ve ever used. And it sounds great via AES/EBU, slaved to my Rossini via the 75 ohm clock input. I’m unable to hear a difference between my CD rips played through Roon and the same CD via the SMSL
The Bad - I thought I’d love a top loader, but this one is fussy to use. The aluminum grip on the acrylic lid is small and awkward to grasp unless your hand is directly above it. The display is really nice but the readout is frustrating - the time details are nice and big, but the track number info is tiny and difficult to read from across the room
The Ugly - With so many buying on Amazon I thought Id give it a try. When it arrived, the OEM package was wrecked, it had clearly been opened - no shrink-wrap, the clamshell box was torn in half and the product info was ripped off the side. This was clearly a second - but no mention of that. The product inside however appears as new and had all of the protective plastic covers. The Seller was Fine Music. Amazon is horrible - next to impossible reach anyone to complain. Too much effort to return a product that appears to be working perfectly. What a lousy first experience with the SMSL Brand.
The downright horrible - Many I expect get a product like this and want to make sure it has the latest firmware. No version info in the menu. SMSL published an update on their site, so i downloaded and gave it a go. It took 20 min of conversation with an AI bot to figure out the correct Vulcan death grip to get the turn on sequence to work to install the firmware. Lousy UX.
Funny - I looked at a few video reviews - none of them picked up on this stuff.
In the end I will keep it as I want to have good CD playback and this is likely the closest i will get to the sound quality of a dCS transport.
also I picked up an iFi Silent Psu 5v which seems to play well with the SMSL