Intro
Contents
On Sunday, Nov. 26, we listened to six wonderful CD loops. Now some will think, “Huh….? Don’t all the cd-transports sound the same?” Well … they obviously do not! We put six models up to 1500 Euros side by side. The differences? You can read about them in this multitest. And experience it in the video on the end.Â
It has been a very long time since we have seriously looked and listened to optical media. Even though colleague Geoffrey uses its transport regularly. The reason we don’t use – and discuss – it as much on the editorial side is that it just wasn’t that popular on Alpha Audio. But we’re just going to give it another shot. Purely because we find that CDs sound very good and that they often sound even better than the digital stream at online services. Read more about the how and why in this opinion piece on remasters.
The test
Now, many readers will either have a nice d/a converter or an amplifier with built-in dac. after all: most, more modern amplifiers already have a dac. That is why we have chosen CD transports for this test. These you connect digitally to the d/a converter. So they have no analog outputs. This saves costs for the manufacturer, allowing more time and money to be spent on the design of the cd-drive.
The candidates
We initially wanted to request CD drives around 1000 Euro. As it turns out, there are not many of them. The bulk are either cheaper (sub 700 Euros) or around 1200 – 1500 Euros. In short: we have one cheaper one and the rest are around 1200 – 1500 Euros.
- Roksan Atessa CD Transport – 700 euros
- Atoll DR200 – 1550 Euros
- NuPrime CDT-8 – 1300 Euro
- Tentlabs B Drive – 1300 Euro
- Cyrus CD-T – 1500 Euro
- Audiolab 9000CDT – 1200 Euro
That’s a nice list to work with, we think! All CD drives are tested on the Sonnet Pasithea d/a converter. We use an Audioquest VDM3 coax as an interlink. The Sonnet sends the converted signal directly into the Pass Labs X150.8. That goes through a Van den Hul CNT. The Pass sends the signal through a Van den Hul Nova to the TAD Evolution 2.
Filtering is from Isotek and Yeti. Mains cabling for the test candidates was kept standard. Everything else is from Yeti.
Measurements
We tried to measure as much as possible on these CD transports. Not all models give easy access to the clock. Or make it accessible at all as with the Atoll. With the Cyrus, we just can’t get a solid lock on the clock. That has to do with the construction of this player, not the quality of the clock.
All in all, we looked at: jitter, rise time, noise on the power supply.
There’s an interesting article by Stereophile about different CD transports and their impact on sound. Granted, it’s not very recent, but it seems that physics are still the same.
Know this one?
https://www.stereophile.com/features/368/index.html
Cheers!