Wow, back the boat up here.

Transports do not make a difference??? Thats not true, they make a huge difference! This is such a big subject that I do not have the time to type all the reasons.

First let me start off by saying that the tranport is the first item in your chain of gear. If you have a bad signal from the start none of your other components are going to fix it. If you had a $100 CD player feeding a Mark Levinson amp to a set of Martin Logan speakers or any other high end gear, it would sound awful. The fact is that all you will hear is just how bad the source (the $100 CD player) is not how good the other stuff is. Amps and speakers are designed to be NEUTRAL and to change to sound as little as possible. They will not make a bad source sound better.

Most people see CD's as reading like a record in a linear fashion but the is NOT the case. They read infomation in thirds. The information is divided up into three sections on the CD, so as the laser reads it put all three sections together to get the data. If for some reason it can only get 2 of the 3 pieces it will use error correction to guess what the third piece of information. Now I do not know about you but I do not want a CD player to guess what the CD acually says. It is quite simple really, the better the transport the more information that can be sent to the DAC for decoding.

If transposts did not make a difference then why does the Linn Genki and Linn Ikemi sound different? The use the same DAC! The only thing that is differenet of other than balance outputs is the transport. The Genki uses a philips CDM12 transport while the Ikemi uses a custom built Linn transport. Any person who has ever listen to these two players can tell you that the Ikemi sounds much better. Wether the Ikemi is is worth twice as much is another question depends on your budget. But the fact is the transport makes things sound different.

As a test take your current CD player and place about 10-15 pounds of books, or anything else really heavy on your player. Put it over the transport if you can and then sit down a listen to an album you know really well. Then take the weight off and see if you can hear the difference. Somethings tells me that you will like it with the weight on it.

What is does is reduce some of the vibration in the player allowing the transport to get a better reading of the disc and thus send more info to the DAC.

Imagine it kinda like a record: if the record is wobbling around the stylus will have a hard time getting a good reading on it and the best phono stage in the world will not make it sound any better. In a sense the same is true for CD. If the CD is wobbling around due to a bad transport, the laser is not going to get a good reading on it so the best DAC in the world is still not going to make the transport work or sound any better.

Now in all of this I still have not taken into acount the laser quality, power supply quality are anything else in there. When I said I would not have time to explain everything I ment it. Check out UHF magizine quick high fidelity reading coure. http://www.uhfmag.com/book1.html It is quite good. I would recommend the books, they will tell you everything I did and more. If your are going to get them, get both of them. They are worth it. Look on thier websitw www.uhfmag.com and they have special internet deal were you can save some money.

Well I hope this helps. The next time someone says to use a mega changer as a transport and tells you it will not make a difference, do not believe them. To most people they simply do not know any better and there own rational and what companies like JVC has said has taught them otherwise.

Cheerio and good luck.

I would recomment a Rega Planet by the way. You can find them new for about $1200 canadian if you look and call around. From what I hear they sound mighty nice. And my ears are acustom to my best friends Wadia CD player.