Audiolab 6000CDT Dedicated CD Transport with Remote - Black

The Audiolab 6000 CDT transport is not for everyone. It’s not a fancy CD player that these days have tons of bells and whistles. Plug ins for USB Sticks, play every cd under the sun and have a high end DAC in them with upsampling. (So they say) Ive tried out two CD players under the thousand dollar mark. I had a friend bring over his one thousand and two hundred player and I have an old one bit SONY ES player that had balanced outputs as well as single ended. And digital.We did a blind listening test between the two of us (yes it was as good as we could get with a blanket in front and one of us changes the inputs then adjust the volume with a decibel measurement while the other one listening after adjustments. Note: no beer was harmed during this experiment! ) serious the beer came afterwards. We listened to cd players that had analogue out, picked the best one and then compared all of them with digital out to the audiolab using digital out. The Sony ES performed the best in analogue out. Not surprisingly as it’s an incredible device which I will still keep. Then we did digital out with all devices into a Musician Draco. The winner was the Audiolab. It’s not hard to understand. Audiolab by eliminating all the other components spent the money specifically in reducing jitter. For those of you who don’t know or aren’t clear on jitter I advise you to read up on it. In my opinion is it’s the most underrated specification on a good transport. Many don’t even list it on source Devices. In my opinion I believe you will hear a difference in lower jitter vs high jitter. Bottom line, this unit is a no brainer if you have a decent DAC. My Sony ES was good, but both its analogue and digital couldn't beat digital out of the Audiolab. There’s been some statements that it’s using a car CD loader, I opened my unit and carefully looked at the loader. It’s definitely not a car CD loader, you can see it’s very well built and by the size there’s no way it would fit in a cars DIN mount.

Es el segundo transporte que compro de esta marca. Ofrece un sonido neutro y confiable, no presenta problemas de lectura hasta el momento. Me gusta el tamaño del display, grande y brillo adecuado. Sin duda, una ganga para los que tenemos una amplia colección de CDs.

Over the past couple of years, I've bought several Audiolab 6000CDT's for use in different rooms. I paired them all with Audiolab 6000A integrated amps but varied the speaker arrangements. All of the CDT's arrived in perfect condition and all of them have performed flawlessly, as have the Audiolab amplifiers.My most recent Audiolab6000CDT purchase was used to replace an old Teac CD player that was paired with a Yamaha A-S501BL amp that I'd bought years ago for my office. I was curious as to whether the CDT would improve the sound quality on its own, so I replaced it without replacing the amplifier and was happy to discover that I could instantly hear the difference. The improvement was massive and that system now sounds quite good even though the amp and speakers are not at the same level as my other systems.Therefore, I'm recommending the Audiolab6000CDT based upon multiple copies and years of use in a variety of configurations without a single glitch.Be warned, however...Because I'd had such good experiences with these devices, I also bought multiple copies of the Audiolab6000N streamers, which, unfortunately, proved to be a huge, expensive, mistake. The streamers look similar, seem well constructed and sound good but the incompetently designed computer interface has rendered them so unreliable I do not even use them. So, I got seriously burned by my careless assumption that the company's products would all manifest the same level of quality. Not so...

I got this CDT sometime ago when it was still selling at full price (the current $100 discount is because it has recently been discontinued, leaving the 7000CDT and 9000CDT still in production.I initially used it with an OK DAC, and the sound was just OK, nothing special. Based on the reviews, this was supposed to make even el-cheapo DACs sound great. Turns out my DAC had a cracked circuit board and was faulty. That took me a couple years to figure out.Scroll foward to a couple weeks ago. The faulty DAC was replaced by the lauded Gustard R26.The 6000CDT/R26 combo is staggeringly good, at ANY price, and especially for the $2300 that pairing would cost. Everything I have heard about the CDT and Gustard have been fullfilled. Immense deep soundstage, near perfect separation of intruments, miniscule details are revealed and the bass is both deep and tuneful with absolutely no sense of overhang or loss of control. The best sound I have had for maybe a dozen years.So is the sound I am getting because of the 6000CDT or the Gustard? It has got to be both. But what I CAN say is that the 6000CDT into the Gustard sounds maybe 10% better than the identical material (ripped lossless by me) streamed through the Gustard.I then pulled out my old reference CD player...a mammoth 2 box combination that weighs close to 50 lbs and cost me around $20,000 back in the day. Now I could compare this to the 6000CDT/Gustard. And guess what....this extremely expensive player was easily beaten by the system containing the 6000CDT. Vocals were clearer and more carved in space, top end had greater clarity and the bass was much firmer than my reference CD player. Bear in mind, that I have compared this player to many other high ranking CD players in the past, and it always was better.Until now.If you are into tweaky stuff, replacing the fuse in this CDT with something like the HiFi Tuning one (which is what I did) gives incremental increases in clarity, even though this is just a digital transport.What else can I say about the 6000CDT apart from how extraordinary well it works in my system?Well, it never rejects a disk or has any skipping. It always reads the tracks and table of contents flawlessly. It is fairly silent in operation. And although it is a slot loading transport, it has never scratched any of my disks, and I keep them in mint condition-so I would know. Others have commented that this player had scratched their disks, but this has never been an issue with me.The supplied remote is on the cheap side, but does pretty much all you can ask. The black finish I have make the push knobs on the fascia a bit difficult to see and read, so the remote can come in handy.The quality of replay from this unit makes me seriously consider the 9000CDT, at 3x the price (currently around $1500). But I would have to hear it first in my system.

Yes, some people, like I do, still have physical CDs. Yes, I have the ability to stream my personal collection of over 1300 CDs that I have ripped in FLAC to a networked storage server. Yes, I also subscribe to digital streaming services like Tidal and Spotify. But...There’s something satisfyingly therapeutic about grabbing a CD and loading it into a transport for a listen. This AudioLab does not disappoint. While I have had many CD players in the past I decided to get a transport-only (no on-board DAC) and feed it to a hybrid digital amp (in this case a NAD C-368) and keep it all simple. The 6000CDT is clean, well-built, and looks great in the audio stand. The matte-black finish however is a fingerprint magnet.One day I may even get the matching AudioLab 6000A hybrid amplifier but for now I’m happy with this arrangement. I might even lose a pound or two loading CDs into the player more often now.