They say a jack of all trades is the master of none. While this expression is typically used to describe people, it also works for machines that play 5" optical discs.
The Compact Disc was launched in 1982, but the four decades since have seen an alphabet soup of similar-looking shiny discs including major formats like DVD, SACD, DVD-A, and Blu-ray Audio. As each new format arrived, hardware manufacturers scrambled to keep up, developing machines that could play just about any disc you could throw at them (or, rather, insert in them). The result was a bunch of “jack of all trades” disc spinners like the deservedly popular Oppos, which some boutique manufacturers then used as a base unit to create their own multiple format players.
But what if we gave up the notion of universal compatibility and concentrated on building a player dedicated to squeezing the best possible results from the very first, and by far the most common, shiny 5" disc, the good old-fashioned “Red Book” Compact Disc? Would we get better performance?
Why does a CD player need to include error correction if there aren’t any errors to correct?
Among the many who decided to try is Jay Ho of Jay’s Audio, who set out to create the ultimate player for the billions of regular CDs out there.1 That quest has culminated in the CDT3-MK3. (I’ll simply call it the CDT3 from here forward.)
Few subjects are guaranteed to raise the hackles of the measurement-centric audio crowd quite as much as a discussion on the sonic qualities of CD transports. Okay, maybe high-performance audio cables is another, and also digital-audio servers—but digital audio is perfect, right? After all, they’ll tell us, bits are bits: It doesn’t matter how fancy the machine spinning the
