Interesting and, perhaps, inevitable introduction of Vivaldi Transport Mk II. However aside from minor styling differences and Mosaic control are they not otherwise now the same thing? I haven’t checked prices yet.
Any further advice?
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As far as I can tell it’s a different drive in it, Esoteric VRDS availability related probably. Not sure if anything else is different, we would need to ask @James
In the meantime, anyone ditching their mark I Vivaldi transport let me know 
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Exactly:
Which AFIK is the same thing as in Rossini. Yes indeed James’ advice would help. The current price differential between the old Vivaldi and the Rossini transports in the UK is around £20k. So assuming that MK II is not going to feature a price reduction (currently I don’t know, it may), what would I get from buying one to replace my existing Rossini? BTW , my listening hierarchy is :
- Qobuz.
- UPnP files
- BBC Radio
4 &5. equal, Vinyl, Silver disc.
Hi Pete,
Functionally yes, that’s about the gist of it. The main body of work for this product came from software engineering. Having the unit speak “Vivaldi language” for all the necessary bits (such as Mosaic and EasyPlay) took a fair bit of work, as it was being done on a hardware platform which we had not used that software code base on before.
The mechanical design was more than it may seem initially as well behind the scenes, with a number of new parts being created for the new fascia. The finish of course needed to be in the Vivaldi silver as opposed to the Rossini silver – so different anodisation processes needed for the metalwork as well.
Overall though, it will perform similarly to the Rossini Transport, which as you know, sounds pretty damn good in a Vivaldi stack. KJ will be able to provide pricing info 
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This is the new dCS price list in the Benelux per 15 October, 2023:
From: https://www.moremusic.nl/prijslijsten/dcs.pdf
The Rossini Transport became more expensive, the new Vivaldi Transport Mk II came down considerably, compared to the original one. From € 49,000 → € 36,500. Perhaps this is incorrect?
To compare: dCS price-list September 2023
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Thanks James. It does indeed.So much more than a marginal improvement over the Paganini transport with its Teac UMK-V drive. I might give Jason at KJ a ring. Might.
In a world where everything new seems to get a lot more epensive it’s a breath of fresh air for dCS to decrease the price of the new transport to factor in the less expensive D&M drive. Kudos to dCS if this pricing is correct!
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In France, the VIVALDI range costs respectively:
Transport : 46 500 €
Dac APEX : 43 500 €
Upsampler: 31 000 €
Clock : 23 000 €
The transport mechanism of the VIVALDI is the original ESOTERIC VRDS NEO VMK3 (pretty much the same as on the SCARLATTI transport).
From the current ATLAS series, ESOTERIC has decided to stop selling its mechanisms (and it’s a shame because they are the best in the world), just as SME no longer sells its arms separately from its turntables.
Ah, on that aspect SME have changed their mind again. They now DO sell their arms separately once more. I guess their market shrunk too much by only selling whole turntables with arms and all.
SDIF-2 has been dropped too I see. As this was most probably for legacy compatibility it won’t really matter.
Esoteric’s decision is now many years old and had a persuasive reason.
As you will know Teac/Esoteric made a variety of transports some of which were available for sale to other manufacturers. This arrangement is called OEM ( Original Equipment Manufacturer sales). Esoteric SACD mechanisms relied upon a component made by Sony which decoded the SACD encryption. However Sony ceased the manufacture of these many years ago. Teac/Esoteric kept an NOS stock but eventually this became depleted. They then decided that they could no longer support OEM sales of these mechanisms containing this component as they only had enough remaining stock for their own purposes.
As these OEM sales had been curtailed dCS bought the entire remaining stock of the Neoteric mechanism from them. This all happened a number of years ago. The original Vivaldi and Vivaldi One continued production thereon using mechanisms from this purchase. NB: all of this is pretty well known so I am not revealing any secrets. It is now several years further on and presumably these too have been depleted. Hence the necessity of MkII. Incidentally the price that you quote for the Vivaldi Transport in France looks to me to be that of the original and not the new Mk II. However this ultimately depends upon the local distributor so may need verification.
I will have to check this. If so it means that tedbook CDs cannot be played in their original resolution as the AES ports will upsample 16/44.1. So that saves me a phone call to KJ 
The AES3 output (and the S/PDIF outputs) always outputs 44.1k, so that can be connected to Upsampler or to DAC directly. That does mean though that if you want to play SACDs, they will be downsampled to 44.1k through this output.
That’s where EasyPlay comes in. You can use EasyPlay to have the DAC change which input it is looking at when different types of discs are loaded into the Transport, so you could set the system up to play SACDs direct to Vivaldi DAC via Dual AES in their native DSD format, and have redbook CDs go through the Upsampler via AES3 with no upsampling taking place. That’s where the Vivaldi comms come in with the Mark II, allowing the Transport and DAC to communicate about what disc has been loaded and what input to look at.
Either way, I would recommend single AES or S/PDIF over SDIF-2 from a quality perspective, even for standard 44.1k from a redbook CD.
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Thank you James. This explains easyplay a bit better to me. As someone with currently just the DAC and as other ancillaries older series (Paganini transport and NWB), this makes me wonder about a few things which I never considered before and are more general for both versions Vivaldi transport (and Rossini):
- Does Easyplay require the RS232 for communications?
- SACD discs can never be upsampled to a higher rate of DSD or DXD, correct?
- As the transport can also upsample redbook to up to DSD128 and 384/24, is there a benefit of letting the upsampler handle this route? Most probably because the hardware has a separate housing and power supply there is a better sound?
Good to see you have found a replacement for the transport, and that you feel it’s off good enough quality.
Also nice to see a sizeable price decrease with the mk2.
Will be interesting to see how the new mk2 gets on against the mk1 for sound quality. Can you comment on this at all ? Especially if no difference is noticeable.
Very good to know that should anything happen to my Vivaldi Transport, there’s now a Transport II to maintain the stack’s completeness with.
Kudos to the dCS team for bringing this to market. 
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Yes.
In the full Vivaldi stack, the Upsampler is the main hub and the Transport and DAC have connections from the 3-way RS232 cable.
Yes.
Yes. 
Not to mention the numerous upsampling-filter options on the Upsampler which aren’t available on the Transport.
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In two days, from 15 to now 17 October, the Linas got cheaper here, the Vivaldi prices seem correct:
Lina DAC: 15,500 → 14,950
Lina Clock: 9,000 → 8,750
Lina Headamp: 11,000 → 10,750
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Understand dCS is running out of VRDS mechanisms. But make no mistake: nothing beats the robustness of the VRDS hardware, not even close. If I were shopping for a transport I would go mad trying to find a VRDS unit.