James, can you tell us some more about the upcoming cd drive? Specifically: Will the combination of the new cd drive and the new dac offer superior redbook reproduction than the one-piece bcd-1? I know that the one-piece unit will probably have slightly less jitter, I'm wondering if that will be offset by the dac's dual mono construction and perhaps a superior drive in the new transport. When is the new drive scheduled to ship, and any chance we can persuade Bryston to include a larger display window than the one in the bcd-1? Will the new cd drive have AES/EBU outputs?
As a sidenote, I want to thank you for your active participation in these forums--it's warmly appreciated by Bryston fans everywhere.
Hi,
Good question. The BDA-1 is just an External DAC so the outboard drive will have a different model number. We are getting ready to start building the BDA-1 (have many backorders already) but the Drive is still 6 months away. We are investigating a number of outboard drives at the moment. The CD Player has dual power supplies with independent analog and digital sections so the only difference between the CD Player and the External BDA-1 DAC will be the dual DAC's in the BDA-1.
The advantage of the CD Player of course is that the DAC and the Drive can be clocked through a Master clock and that eliminates any jitter issues. Our intention is to have a second cable -clock cable- from our External Drive that will clock back to the BDA-1 and therefore allow for the same synchronization of DAC and Drive as in our CD Player.
As for the drive making a difference that's a tough one- you have opinions on both sides of the fence so I guess you have to decide that one for yourself in a specific setup. What I can say is that once the CD is lifted out of the tray (which it is when playing) the drive is not going to have as much of an influence on the sound as the electronics. My personal feeling is that the reason the Bryston CD Player has been receiving such exceptional reviews worldwide is because the pure class A discrete proprietary circuitry that Bryston utilizes far exceeds any performance differences attained using different drives or specific DAC's.
What I can say is when we run blind A/B listening tests with the CD Player vs the External DAC (using the CD Player as a Drive only) it is really tough to tell which is which. In fact we tried it recently at the CES Show in Vegas and got a 50-50 split in preferences.
james
