Gramophone Dreams

It's the late 1980s, and I'm soldering tube amplifiers on a plywood bench. I decide on a whim that it's time to break down and buy a CD player to supplement the Dynaco tuner and Dual cassette deck in my workroom music system.

I was a slow starter with digital because of my early take on CD sound: It was emotionally drained with grumbling distortions in the bass and an off-timbre midrange, crowned by a thin, artificial treble, and penetrated by an eerie, unnatural silence whenever the musicians stopped playing. I thought cassettes had higher fidelity and that CDs would be a passing fad, but I kept browsing CDs at Tower Records, and the itch to buy some was getting pretty strong.

One of my friends said, "Maybe it's not the conversion principle that's to blame but something else, like an imperfect CD player?" That interesting thought had not occurred to me, but it obviously occurred to lots of engineers, because they are still trying to improve the quality of CD playback by adjusting the mechanism.

My friend's thought prompted me to ask my engineer pal, a short-tempered wizard named Dick, what CD player he used. He responded in his best gruff know-it-all voice, "These new CD players are shit! Don't buy one until they make one where the transport mechanism floats!" When I asked if anybody made one that floated, he said that he used a portable, battery-powered Optimus CD player from Radio Shack, and that its transport mechanism floated, and that it sounded better than any audiophile deck. Dick "knew things," so I believed him.

When I got to Radio Shack and saw the player he recommended, I laughed at its plastic-toy flying-saucer style. It looked the opposite of serious, but a closer inspection and a quick listen with its included headphones suggested there might be some good engineering hidden beneath its UFO casework. The more I examined the Optimus, the more it seemed perfect for my workbench, my bike, and my car. It cost around a hundred bucks, so I bought one and kept it as my only CD player until 1993, when I capitulated and bought my first nonportable CD player: a TEAC VRDS-10.

I chose the VRDS-10 because I liked how it looked: sturdy and professional, as though it was built to broadcast-quality standards.

I used the 10 almost exclusively as a disc transport, attached to a variety of expensive DACs, until, influenced by advertising and seeking an upgrade, I bought a serious dedicated transport: the 37lb(!) belt-drive C.E.C. TL1. At the time, C.E.C. was one of the world's leading manufacturers of OEM transports and complete CD players. With the top-loading C.E.C., the sound became gentler, smoother, quieter, more analog-like—but transient attack and the PRaT-boogie factor were not up to what I'd been enjoying from my VRDS-10.

My amp-builder friend Uchida was using a Studer a730 CD player, which established a high benchmark for purity of tone, sharp focus, and transient bite. He thought it sounded like magnetic tape, but it was not free, and it was not available in the United States.

My next transport was another belt-drive top-loader: 47 Lab's Flatfish. I purchased the Flatfish partly because I liked its name, partly because I liked how it looked, and partly because I liked how undigital it made CDs sound. The Flatfish played as rich of tone, smooth, and unmechanical as the C.E.C. did, but it died young. Desperate and exasperated, I bought a $100 Oppo CD player. The generic-looking Oppo played satisfactorily and survived 10 years of daily use—until its drawer stuck closed.

After my $100 Oppo broke and then two hand-me-down CD players died (one with the drawer stuck open), I reluctantly surrendered to streaming. I streamed every day until I reviewed Hegel's Mohican CD player, during which time I realized that silver discs present recordings with more force and more conspicuous momentum than streaming. When the Mohican left, I returned to streaming. Until ...

I reviewed Hegel's newest CD player, the Viking, and Rotel's DT-6000 "DAC-transport" and realized that CDs can also swagger and sing the most refined operas.

After the Hegel and Rotel players departed, I missed playing CDs, so I bought a $249 Onkyo C-7030 CD player (on Amazon) to use as a transport, connecting its digital output to whatever DAC was in the big system using Kimber Kable's D60 coaxial cable, which I bought in the mid-'90s. Today, at $490 per meter, the D60 costs about twice as much as the CD player.

Used as a transport, the C-7030 impressed with its natural tone and lively PRaT. Its solidity and punch are superior to internet streaming, so I'm happy every time I use it.

But I don't understand: Why do CDs sound more corporeal than streamed music files? Maybe 40 years of playing CDs rewired my brain. I am guessing, but I imagine the more CPU operations a DAC needs to perform, the more juice it sucks from its power supply and the more its tiny signals bounce around and pick up garbage. I imagine also that pushing raw data through different types of cable (fiber-optic, LAN, S/PDIF, USB, AES3, etc.) offers significant clocking challenges. Since the silver disc emerged from the labs at Philips and Sony, my biggest complaint about CD player sound is how music seems weak and energy challenged. But that view has changed: In recent years, whenever I've used a daily-driver CD player as a disc transport, sending its digital output into the latest state-of-the-art upsampling converters like the dCS Lina and Bartók Apex, or truth-telling NOS R-2R DACs like the HoloAudio May or the Denafrips Terminator Plus, the upgrade in force and presence with CD (vs streaming) was not subtle.

My listenings this month took that observation to the next level: Using a separate, high-precision CD transport in a heavy chassis, with multiple dedicated power supplies, feeding a DAC in a separate heavy chassis, with its own shielded power supply and a current-pushing output stage, sounds a lot more solid and articulate than my tin-sided $250 CD player or streaming from my computer.

More than 30 years after I bought that TEAC VRDS-10 CD player, I am using TEAC's new VRDS-701T CD transport ($2699.99; footnote 1)—and its mechanism floats! (If only grumpy Dick was alive to witness this.) Feeding data extracted in the 701T transport to the dCS Lina DAC with master clock, or LTA's Aero tube DAC, or HoloAudio's Spring 3 or May DAC, is a paradigm-shifting experience. The sound I am getting is stronger, denser, clearer, and more precisely focused than any digital playback I've had in my home, ever. I feel like I'm experiencing digital at some new, more exacting level of insight and engagement. The music sounds almost as visceral as analog. And it took just 40 years to get to this point.

The TEAC VRDS-701T
When I opened the box containing TEAC's VRDS-701T CD transport, I was greeted by a sheet of paper warning that it was okay if the 701T "rattled like there was something loose inside," because there was something loose inside: the CD drive mechanism.

Near the front, the owner's manual states, "Thank you for choosing TEAC. In order to enhance the audio quality, the entire CD mechanism employs a floating structure, so it is not fixed to the chassis of the unit. The entire mechanism, including the tray, can move slightly forward, backward, left, and right. This is by design and no cause for concern."

I believe the main purpose of a CD drawer is to prevent users from scratching CDs as they insert them. The 701T's drawer is made of extremely thin flexible plastic. As they say in baseball, it has "soft hands."

I wrote public relations person extraordinaire Jaclyn Inglis, asking if she could find out how TEAC's new VRDS-701T mechanism differs from the one in my VRDS-10 CD player. She forwarded my question to TEAC's head of product planning, Jo Yoshida:

"It has been about 20 years since we last released a CD player with a VRDS mechanism. This new transport mechanism incorporates all the technologies we have developed over the years to achieve a higher sound quality. But the basic concept of the VRDS mechanism has remained unchanged. By clamping the optical disc on a turntable of the same diameter, the surface blurring caused by rotational vibration and warping is suppressed, and the relative optical axis accuracy between the optical pickup and the pits and lands of the signals engraved on the disc is increased. This also reduces the servo current, resulting in improved sound quality.

"The original mechanism was designed to suppress vibration by increasing the rigidity of the moving mechanism and fixing it rigidly (the acronym "VRDS" stands for Vibration-free Rigid Disc-clamping System), but the concept here is to naturally reduce vibration by fixing it in a semi-floating state rather than forcibly suppressing vibration. This floating concept is based on the knowledge cultivated through the development of Esoteric's Grandioso CD transport. The idea is to reduce vibration naturally by fixing it in a semi-floating state.

"In order to converge vibrations as quickly as possible, the bridge supporting the turntable is designed to be lightweight and fixed only on one side, in a semi-floating structure to suppress feedback generation of unwanted resonance."

---

Footnote 1: TEAC. US Distributor: Playback Distribution, 3257 Wildlife Trail, Zionsville, Indiana 46077. Web: playbackdistribution.com