I'm going to be purchasing a Bel Canto DAC2 in a few months and figured that I should start looking around for a transport to use with it. Price cap is around $1000 used or new.

I've scoured these forums and found the following transports:

Pioneer PD-65
Pioneer PD-59
Sony SCD-222es
Sony SCD-333es
Sony SCD-555es
Sony XA20ES
Sony XA7ES
NAD c541i
Cambridge Audio (model?)
California Audio Labs Icon Mark II
NEC CDR-601 & 602
Philips DVD 963SA
Linn ikemi (model?)
Philips CDM12 Transport (used by many players)
Theta Transport (model?)
California Audio Delta Transport
Parasound CBD-2000
Rega Planet (model?)


Any suggestions or recommendations?

Strike the Ikemi off your list.
It is a one box CD player and it sounds better used as one box player compared to used in conjunction with DAC2. ( not really worth the cost just to use it as a transport )

I'd vote for Rega Planet used as a transport.

The Sony XA20ES is an extremely solid and well made unit, and would make a great transport. The drive unit was based on the world class XA7ES which sold for $3000.00. Used XA20ES units are also going very cheaply. Their feature set is virtually perfect too.



JC

I am very happy with my ModWright Pioneer DVD player as a transport. I was able to pick up a DV-656A for about $100 and then sent it off to have Level II Transport mods and Bybee filters installed at ModWright. The turnaround was about two weeks and I am very happy with the results. All in, with shipping and everything, you should be able to do much better than $1000.

Quote:



That actually interests me a lot. I always thought of Modwright as being a company that does mods for expensive standalones. Apparently, they also mod for use a transport. I can see how this would cut costs for me as non-essential components that are bypassed by the external DAC will not have to upgraded. I think I'll do a bit more research into this and see what comes up

I should add that you can't pass high res signals through the digital out of a universal player, without getting an expensive mod from MSB. Although, I do listen to DVD-A through my Link III anyway, and with the transport mod, it sounds better than it did out of the analog stage of the player.