A good cd player as a transport?

I have heard that Marantz are seemingly good for transport duties, they will play just about anything.

I have also heard this of NAd as they seem to have very low jitter(the 541 and the 521) So there digital out should be quite good. And pioneer dvd players seem to get modded alot for transport duties.

Just my 2 cents


D

The Pioneer PDR series with the "Stable Platform" mechanisms are great transports.

Also, the Rega Planet series are great transports (and redbook players in their own right).

I believe only Pioneer's recorders used the Stable-Platform mechanism. But even those have been discontinued, though. So you have to find one used (eBay?) in the US$200 range, or NOS. Worth the effort though. Some higher-end player manufacturers are still using Stable-Platform mechanism (OEMed by Pioneer) for their transports.

Cambridge Audio CD players make good transports too. For one thing they use BNC SPDIF, which is the best implementation of SPDIF, unusual at their price point.

A used California Audio Labs Icon Mark II will be an excellent transport. They are now very cheap (300-500) on the used market (the company went out of business). They are built very solidly, and extract a great deal of information from the disc. Low jitter too.

Hi Mark,

Meridian used to do a superb transport but I can't remember the model number :-(

Mike

PS: Cambridge audio is designed in Cambridge UK but manufactured in China (where the great wall is)

In the role of a budget transport, I'll cast a qualified vote in favor of the NAD C521i. In fact, rather recently I put one in service for just that function. Overall I'm quite pleased.

As most know, the C521i only offers S/PDIF RCA coaxial output, whereas the C541i has S/PDIF optical output as well.

Regarding the C521i, one issue that struck me as rather odd was that when a CD was loaded and initialized, this would cause my downstream effects processor to loose lock on the digital signal coming from the NAD. The effects processor is also being used as a DAC, post-processing. This wasn't a fatal problem since the signal could be manually re-locked via the processor's interface, once the CD had finished initializing.

After placing a GW Labs DSP between the NAD and the effects processor, the problem disappeared. Yet this same behavior did not occur when using either an inexpensive Sony CDP-XE370 or a Cary CD-308 CD player as a transport.

I doubt if this would be a concern with most DACs intended for consumer use, but I thought I'd note it nonetheless.

Along the same lines, I'm not too certain just how good the C521i's absolute jitter performance really is. I say that because the effects processor I'm using will loose synch with an input signal if that signal deviates much at all in terms of clock frequency. This is actually documented as a part of the processor's specification.

Both the NAD C521i and Sony CDP-XE370 provoked that behavior, which although intermittent and rare, oddly enough was always program dependent, i.e., specific only to certain parts of certain tracks on certain CDs. However, the Cary player never had a problem.

Again, the use of a GW Labs DSP completely eliminated this issue in the case of the NAD player.

TravelLite