Transport for Chord64 DAC

Given 3 different Marantz players as CD transport... the SA17-S1 CD/SACD player, DV9500 DVD player & SA11-S1 CD/SACD player... will I be able to tell much difference at all when hooked through the 64DAC?

Cheers!

 

I doubt it.

 

Hopefully the SA17-S1's SACD replay (stereo) is pretty close to the SA11-S1's quality, as I'm still not keen to give up the multi-channel side of things.

 

all cd players will give a vastly differing sound via the truly outstanding Chord DAC64. incidently the exposure 22 cd appears to operate as an exceptionally good transport but not so hot with it's own DAC.

 

Not in my experience - I had the DAC 64 with several different transports - shanling scd200T sacd palyer, meridian 500mk2 tranpsort, pioneers dvd 717 and dv868.... couldn't tell the difference, the whole point of the DAC64 is that it buffers the data to achive transport indepedence.

 

:WMarrives

 

Mind the door Pete

 

The transport's job is just to turn the data on the CD into a stream of bits. There is huge error correction on the CDs, and all correctly working transports should be delivering the same stream of bits. That said, I've never read of any attempts to capture and compare the bitstream from different transports.

 

That's the easy bit - the hard part getting the timing of the data right, hence all the fuss over jitter, oscillator quality, PLLs, buffering etc. etc.

For example, the £30 cd-rom drive in my PC reads data perfectly - it has to, otherwise the program won't run properly. The timing of that data stream is completely irrelevant however, and is what we ought to be concerned with!

DT

(I also doubt you will hear much, if any, difference between the marantz transports)

 

Different transports make a big diference in sound. At Lordsummits a few months ago Lordsummits Rotel cd player compared unfavourably with Isaacs Marantz 10 transpot when feeding a nosdac - superdac. Monotone will you be able to tell the difference between your 3 choices i do not know as i haven't heard them myself. Can you not try for yourself?

 

Yes, that is true, but CDROMs (Yellow Book) have more error correction than Audio CDs (Red Book), because computer software has to be byte-for-byte accurate. For audio CDs it is considered that they allow only one unrecoverable bit out of every 10^9 bits read. (With CDROM the extra error correction reduces this to one bit in 10^12). As the Audio CD data rate is 4,321,800 bits per sec, doesn't that mean that there is one error every 231 seconds?

Surely most DACs cache the bitstream and then manage it themselves with their own timing system. That's what CD Walkmans do, so that when the laser 'loses it' due to jolts, there is a nice little cache of bits to draw on while the laser is getting its act back together to top up the cache.

 

Surprisingly no, very few DACs do this.

 

It's a good theory, apart from one thing, CD drives in PCs can go back and have a second go at recovering the data if they didn't get it the first time around, that's not possible with audio CDs. I don't know if PCs actually need to or do a lot of it, but that could explain it.