Reference Transports: An overall perspective


Teajay did a great job by starting a threat called "Reference DACS: An overall perspective."
I thought it might be beneficial to start a similar thread on transports.
Unfortunately I really have nothing much to say; I just hoped to get the ball rolling.

I'll start by throwing out a few names and a question:

Zanden 2000
CEC TL-0X
Metronome Kalista; T2-i Signature; and T2-A
Esoteric P-01; and P-03(?)
EMM Labs CDSD
47Labs PiTracer
Weiss Jason
Accustic Arts Drive 1
Ensemble Dirondo
Wadia 270se

I know that there are very few companies that actually make the drives themselves. The few I know about are:
Philips
TEAC
Sanyo/CEC

Do the various Philips drives or the TEAC VRDS transport mechanism each have a particular sonic signature regardless of which maunufacturer uses them in their designs?
exlibris
Pardales, I think you might be surprized how much of a sonic improvement you would hear with a reference level transport compared with a hard-drive.

I'm no engineer so I don't know why a reference transport would perform better then a hard-drive or an average transport, but every time I have gone to a better transport, right now my reference is the new Accustic Arts Drive1-MK2, the sonics get better, not just different, but a true improvement.
Anything's possible Teajay. If I get a chance to demo a really top-flight transport
in my system I certainly will. That said, my hard-drive based music server isn't
going anywhere, no matter what. There is just nothing like having any song or
album in my entire music collection at my fingertips. You should see the way
iTunes 7 allows you to scroll through your music by album cover. Very cool.
Sorry, I know this is off topic for this thread.
If your transport breaks, you repair or get a new one. If your HD goes south, it gets tossed with all you stuff on it or you have to buy an adapter kit to hopefully download available content that's hopefully not corrupted.
"If your transport breaks, you repair or get a new one. If your HD goes south, it gets tossed with all you stuff on it or you have to buy an adapter kit to hopefully download available content that's hopefully not corrupted."

Bankup is your friend.

Hard dirves are not that expensive these days especially compared to the high-end audio gears, even compared to the cost of repair...

It's not an issue at all.

These days you store all your pictures on hard drives, why not all your music.

It'll be one of the major way of listening to music in the near future.