A few weeks back I gave an old Marantz CD65II a new lease of life as a CD Transport.

I first tried the CD65II in stock form taking the digital output via the RCA socket and it was quite uninspiring.

After reading some of Mr Lampizators musings on improving the SPDIF digital output I took a look at the SPDIF output on the scope and the waveform did not look good.

After some experiments with a small Lundahl digital signal transformer which was only marginally better I decided to try removing the transformer completely and take the SPDIF digital signal direct from the digital filter chip in the player and feed it via a small blocking capacitor and some miniature 75 ohm coax to a BNC socket on the rear panel.

The result was very pleasing, the waveform now looked perfect on the scope. I decided I would improve the internal clock as well and fitted a TCXO now jitter clock module from Valab in Tiawan.

The result was quite a revelation feeding the SPDIF input into my Devialet 440. I have never had a better sound from CD, in fact I’d say it’s got the edge over my ripped CDs played over Ethernet from Roon.

I’m now considering if there is anything to be gained from improving the CD source even further by using a dedicated transport such as the CEC belt drive offerings.

Would anyone who has a CEC transport care to comment on their experience with one of these, are they markedly better than using a CD player as a transport?


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