Is there a Michael Fremer of CD transports? If no, DEAR GOD PLEASE SEND US ONE!!!!

Empirical Audio

Industry Expert
Oct 12, 2017
1,169
207
150
Great Pacific Northwest
www.empiricalaudio.com
Since USB seems to perform less well I don't see why you think it would make sense in a server. I am interested in the Baetis precisely because its preferred output is AES/EBU.

An added bonus is that I could use my current AES/EBU cable that is feeding the DAC from my transport.

I have used good servers like the Antipodes at shows. The Antipodes optimizes for USB. The USB interface is usually better anyway because the Master Clock is in the DAC, not in the server. Close proximity of the Master Clock to the analog output is important, but this also avoids the S/PDIF receiver and goes directly USB to I2S. This is why I recommend USB for servers.

The USB interface in the DAC obviously must be a good implementation that maintains low jitter.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
 

Empirical Audio

Industry Expert
Oct 12, 2017
1,169
207
150
Great Pacific Northwest
www.empiricalaudio.com
Steve, I thought you had given up on USB.

I have both interfaces, but I prefer the Ethernet because of fewer hoops to jump through and cheaper cables. The difference in SQ is small.

Steve N.
 

ferrox

Well-Known Member
Jun 16, 2016
262
55
158
Jakarta, Indonesia
www.primes.asia
I started with Auralic Aries..then went back to Forsell Reference CD Transport. I spent so much trying to revive this Forsell and finally, with some luck and help from a local technician, this beast is singing now. I will never sell this Forsell and have piled up some replacement parts like CDM 9 Pro new optic, some servo board and pcb of this unit.

Amazing that when so many guys "go digital" they throw away their CD transport. And giving up the transport provides a leaner, cleaner, flatter, and more detail sound. This type of sound fits many tastes and is championed by the likes of the Computer Audiophile Geek and "Worthless to the Audio Fans" Robert Harley. When these reviewers hear a new analytical detail, they immediately call it BEST.

But many of those who care about musicality find that high end CD transports bring more emotion and palpability to the music. Despite so many brilliant minds on this board, I haven't been able to understand why... Yet here is one piece of evidence that may explain the differences...

"...The mathematical operations are most commonly performed within the DAC chip but some companies, like Chord, use an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) as this allows the DSP engineer almost unlimited flexibility in creating filters. Unless you want to keep increasing the number of filter coefficients, which Watts finds always gives a sonic improvement. The DAVE, for example, uses a Xilinx FPGA that allows a filter with 164,000 coefficients to be programmed. But even 164,000 taps was not enough for Watts, and the availability of a new Xilinx FPGA, the X7A200T, which has no fewer than 740 DSP cores, 215,360 logic cells, and 16MB of memory, allowed him to increase the number of taps to one million—actually 1,015,808!

So why is the filter in the Blu Mk.2 rather than the DAVE, I asked. "The FPGA draws up to 10A of current," Watts replied, "and DAVE's power supply just can't supply that much current without compromising the noise floor." The Blu can, he explained, so it made sense to put the filter in the Mk.2 version of the transport and feed the filtered data stream to DAVE...."

Now, despite the marketing hype, many people already prefer the Chord DAVE DAC to the well-marketed and overly hyped digtial gear, like dcs, msb, esotoric, and the super-duper analytical Berkeley REf. With the transport, the DAC goes to a much higher level...


https://www.stereophile.com/content/chords-million-tap-digital-filter

Are there any reviewers who are still fighting for the CD transport like "Fearless" Michael Fremer has been fighting for vinyl?
 

bonzo75

Member Sponsor
Feb 26, 2014
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Auralic Aries has a lot of digititis. Not a fair compare.
 

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