cd tweaks

Right, as you lot haven't taken the bait about cd transport drives, I'll get to the point.

Taking that so many of you like to tweak your cd players. Would it be better to find a cd player with the best dac, transport drive (in your opinion), ignore what else its like, then tweak. If you are going to tweak what's the point of paying for more than you are going to keep? Wm and the gang always like to change the clock, power supply and some times the digital out, plus insulate it anyway. Lets say (im not sure about this so bare with me) the Creek 50 cd player has a good drive + dac but the overall sound isn't there, and it cost £700 new (not that we would pay full price). The Creek 53 costs around £1100 new, it uses the same drive plus dac and at £400 pound more.

IF YOU ARE GOING TO TWEAK THERE IS NO POINT IN PAYING MORE FOR THE CREEK 53 IS THERE?

GAZZ

 

I couldn't agree more. My last CD purchase was a Marantz CD63 second hand (£with the intention of upgrading it. It will be interesting to see if the final version (new clock, chassis damping, separate PSU, new output stage) sounds any better than CD player costing the same as the price of the CD63 + mods. A lot of people on the TNT mailing list seem to follow the modifies Marantz route.

 

Why not get a s/h model from one of the better mass market producers like sony or denon rotel etc

you can normally pick these up for at less than fifty pounds, set yourself a budget of say £200 and see what you can make of the player....at risk of boring the regular readers I picked u a £25 denon that now out performs my main cdp a £1k player.

You could then get an expensive player and carry forward some of the mods to that.

I've recently put together a booklet outling the modifications to the fabled Arcam 5 incuding zero oversampling and opamp changes to name a few.

"Johnandjake" from pink fish was the instigation and supplied me with the schematics and photos, I did the leg work and write up....he's noe almost orgasmic with praise.

So if you get a machine pm me and I can pass on a few hints and tips. Or you can look at my efforts on the DIY forum.

 

Well done Zanash, one other point, do the cd drives sound different eg sony faster than Philips.