On Sun, 15 Aug 2004 01:00:59 +0200, Sander deWaal
wrote:

Pooh Bear said:

You'd better believe it! Deep inside the beautiful alloy casing of the
Mark Levinson 'Reference' transport at some $15,000, you'll find
exactly the same Philips industrial transport mech (and associated
electronics) as is used in the jukebox at your local pub.......

No surprise there then !

Wasn't there a better transport available ?

What's wrong with the Philips CD12 or their later reincarnations?
It's a teriffic mechanism. Arcam and many other good players use them
as well.

To be fair, Arcam only use Philips now because Sony stopped making the
CDM-14 'Fine Drive' mechanism.

For audio use, I prefer the TEAC VRDS or Pioneer stable platter
mechanism, though. But that's because I'm a DIY-er who always looks
for things to improve. :-)

Some would say that the best TEAC VRDS transport was the state of the
art, others would argue that for actual reading performance, which is
what really matters, the high-speed CD-ROM drives used by Meridian are
the best, even if they do 'look and feel' a little cheesy.
--

Stewart Pinkerton | Music is Art - Audio is Engineering