Tentlabs B-Drive
Contents
Time for some Dutch glory. But: buy one while you can!
The B Drive – 1300 Euro – is the dedicated cd-transport of Tentlabs. The audio company of Guido Tent, who is also known from Grimm Audio. A name you probably know.
The B Drive has almost all possible outputs: BNC, Optical, AES and also I2S. We don’t see a coaxial output, but in the box is a bnc to coax cable. As is an AES interlink. That’s nice.
The sound can be called very neutral. What stands out is the wonderful – yep – drive that the music gets. It all feels very rhythmic and tight. But without being dry. A fine balance. With Level 42, that makes for a very nice presentation. Although we must say: the Cyrus really makes it a party!
What the B Drive does very well is give the music space: no color, no salt and pepper… just the intention of the artist. That gives the music calmness and the space it needs. All in all, a very nice CD-drive!
Measurements Tentlabs B Drive
Tentlabs is known for its clocks. So we were very curious to see what we would get to see. Funnily enough, the average jitter is fairly average: between 40 and 50 ps Avg jitter.
However: noise is a lot better than with the rest of the field. We finally see normal values in low-freq modulation, and the strip-chart also shows decent, stable scores. We are measuring ps again, instead of ns anomalies. In short: this clock is stable and free of noise. The spdif clock is also nice and fast with 6.7ns risetime at 1.41 MHz.
Then power supply noise. That, too, is neat with the B-Drive. In short: a technically very well balanced product.
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!