It’s challenging, but it’s not rocket science!Ĭontrast that with a CD transport, which is, in my view, a miracle of intricate moving parts which need to be positioned precisely and continuously within fractions of a micrometre, with sophisticated servo-control circuitry, and elaborate digital processing systems! The data bumps pressed into a spiral within the CD have to be positioned under the laser beam and detector assembly at a very steady speed of around 1.4m/s (about 3mph, or walking speed!) and, since the bump spiral runs from inside to outside, the disc rotation motor has to vary its speed as the disc plays, from about 500rpm down to 200rpm, and that needs a sophisticated servo-control system. A lot of expertise is required to design a system in which all the elements come together in a way that achieves the desired level of performance, but we’re really only talking about good PSU design, effective grounding strategies, attention to clocking arrangements, and so on. Once these chips have been designed, the manufacturers can churn them out in the thousands for micro-cents, and the rest of the electronics are pretty cheap to build too. SOS Technical Editor Hugh Robjohns replies: Equipment prices in the audiophile market have always confounded and amazed me, but so too does your acceptance that a nice DAC should cost four times as much as a reliable disc transport! Have you ever really thought about what a CD transport has to do? A DAC is basically a little bit of etched silicon (albeit a cleverly designed one), glued onto a circuit board with lots of other little bits of silicon.

I can live with the idea of spending €1000 on a really nice DAC, or €2000 on really good speakers that will last the rest of my life, but shouldn’t it be entirely possible to make a decent CD transport for €250 or less? How much impact can a CD transport really have on sound quality (assuming there’s nothing wrong with the CD it’s playing)? I’ve been looking for a compact CD transport to hook up to my home-studio DAC and I’m surprised by how expensive they are - €1000 to €2000 isn’t rare and those aimed at rich-and-crazy audiophiles cost 10 times that.

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