The Best Built CD Transport from the 1990’s - The Mark Levinson No. 31
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- čas přidán 20. 07. 2024
- If you’ve never seen this unit in person - prepare to be shocked.
Too bad America doesn’t build audio equipment like this anymore!
This thing is ridiculous in both size, weight, and design.
In 1993 this reference unit cost a staggering $8,495 (Over $15k in today's dollars). To buy a transport of this quality today you’d have to drop close to $20k. CD’s haven’t changed much since that era, so there would be few benefits to buying a current reference unit unless you’re into burning your own MP3 CD’s.
Read more about this piece of Digital Audio history here:
skyfiaudio.com/products/mark-...
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The cd is a beast ! For 1990s it’s amazing
Comparison-I own all ML gear, 31.5/5101 both going into a 526. Optical sounds best...digital/xlr/rca I can't tell. There are differences in the 31.5 and the 5101. Mechanical noise of the 5101 is like a PC drive, 31.5 is very quiet. 31.5 looks the part and the hype is worth it to me/5101 looks like all the other 5000 series-Both sound amazing to me. Going to save for a 519 to confuse things even more. What I can tell you is all ML gear will last a lifetime, timeless looks and can be rebuilt because of the build quality. The 585 integrated has the DAC and the Clarify software/circuitry of the 5000 and high end 5 series. Levinson gear is complex and well thought out. The 526 headphone section when fired up is a wonder to watch the left side of the internals light up and produce heat like a small nuclear power plant.
It's a beautiful design, but I wonder now, as I did back then, were they really worth that much from an audio perspective? Does the transport really matter that much on a CD? It seems to me like all the audio quality difference would come from the DAC circuitry.
You are correct. It DOES NOT matter. The obsession with vibration damping and insanely clean power in these super high-end CD players does nothing of actual value as far as audio is concerned. The data on CD's uses reed-solomon error correction. CD players can, below a certain threshold error rate, actually correct bits that were misread from a disk. The transport just has to be "good enough" to deliver perfect data. Still, it's nice to see well-built, long-lasting stuff even if it's taken to absurd extremes. These are now collectors' items that should be cherished.
I once had a conversation with a guy on a speaker-building forum who was *convinced* that FLAC and Apple Lossless sounded different. I took a sample WAV file, encoded it in FLAC and AL, then ran it through a decoder, and stripped the resulting file headers so the only thing left was 16-bit 44kHz Little-Endian raw PCM samples. 0 bytes difference when compared.
"I don't care. They sound different."
Sure they do. And sure your CD transport makes a difference, too. As do the CDs where you marked the outside rim with a Sharpie to prevent light refraction. My ears are apparently not sensitive enough to distinguish the difference between bitstreams that my computer can't distinguish any difference in either.
Yeah David you are correct. The DAC is the only thing that matters so long as the transport is reading the disc correctly. I suppose this machine gives one bragging rights, it is a beautiful bit of engineering, and to its credit will probably still be working in 50 years.
It is about the process of opening the lid which could pinch your finger and produce blood, loading a cd like vinyl, placing the magnetic dampener, the big buttons, the weight, those beautiful red lights, and that solid aluminum remote...and it sounds pretty good. Hook a cheap mass produced brand to your DAC listen and compare.
good cd transport in good tuned equipment makes a difference. I have a Levinson 31.5 and it's the best I've ever heard ( also CEC TL0-X i s great soundig cd transport ).
Madrigal Audio Labs.. Vinnie Gallo loves their digital stuff.
You could have bought a few Linn Sondek LP12 with that kind of money
This CD is Golden Graal :)
Hey Skyfi, Do you ship items to Singapore?
This was not ML’s “first” cd transport, contrary to the suggestion offered here. I owned their first one, from the previous decade, no competition for a Linn Axis, but supposedly nice for cd engineering.
did you tried the CEC?
Don't need to own it, but you have to appreciate the engineering here. Like i don't need to go to the moon but I can deeply appreciate rocket tech.
A CD player, when playing a typical audio CD, is tracking a spiral track that is about 800um wide, with a pitch between adjacent tracks of about 1.5-1.6um. The pits encoded into the reflective layer have approximate dimensions anywhere from a round 800x800um to an oblong 2000x800um, give or take. It's not really that critical to be perfect.
The disc is spinning from 200 to 500 RPM, or 3-1/3 to 8-1/3 rotations per second. While this is happening, the servo mechanisms are using one or more laser beams tracked by (typically) four photo diodes to ensure the laser is focusing on the center of the track. The relative position of the diodes detect when the laser is wandering to the sides of the track, or when the lens is too close or too far away from the disc. This is all fed into a feedback system that uses an electromagnetic coil to position the lens in 3D space relative to the disc. The pickup head is moved in rough increments to get the lens more or less below the track, and then the focusing system makes fine adjustments to the exact position.
The disc itself may be slightly off-center, causing the track to wobble in and out over its circumference. The disc may be subtly warped, causing the track to wobble up and down relative to the lens. The pickup head will continue to track the spiral even while the head is being moved by the worm gear (or in this case, voice coil) for coarse positioning.
This optical system is so robust, it can even manage to maintain tracking in CD-ROM applications, over _fifty times faster_ than it will spin in CD-audio mode. Not to even speak of DVD, and HD-DVD / Blu-ray applications, where the track pitch is reduced to 1.1um, 0.6um, or 0.48um -- and again, rotating at a higher speed.
But yeah. We need 1/2" thick aluminum and lead sandwiches to eliminate vibrations from our phat woofers pumping kick drums at 80Hz. 🙃
Thanks for the right up. I like over built stuff, but this is insane in not a good way. Not even a dac in there lol
The clamping disc cannot be too heavy else it will spoilt the spindle motor easily or rather wear off...
does it fire nuclear rockets. Oh to be living in those crazy nineties.
LOL
What cheap Cd/dvd would best it today?
Cambridge Audio 840c
@@LaurentValette1234 The same thing was Said about vinyl and cassette... Now look!
I had a 31 and hated it! Machine locked up on me and never worked again. Changed it for an Oracle CD-2500.
That Oracle looks like a spaceship
@@danlivni2097 it's a piece of high end audio art.
@@andygee8716 How do you like the sound of the Oracle CD Player.
@@danlivni2097 it's one of those sources you could listen to all day without stress or fatigue. Mine runs through an old school Nagra DAC which also sounds amazing.
Still makes me cry how Harman threw that womnderful company under the bus just to revive it with something not even a fraction that innovative and capable. The display of that machine btw ist that reflective because it is metallized for eletrical shielding purposes. I had No. 30.5 / No. 31.5 in the late Nineties for several months for a review. I still miss it.
I heard the Mark Levinson 30 Dac and 31 Transport in like 1994 and it was very analog sounding.
Why are the old high end stuff top loaders?
Super reliable, rock solid, different methods of damping and vibration isolation. Some Audiophiles swear by top loading. Some prefer slot vs drawer.
how does it sound?
like every other CD player made in the 90s. just dandy.
😁 Low dvd is ok
¿Why? ¿Transport?
Not quite a Wadia, but a close second 👍💯
A Wadia uses a vrds-neo mechanism from Teac.
@@stevecarol686 Or one of the older generations and other drives as well.
Kind regards.
It's a beautiful thing but it seems so ridiculous that such products exist to just get data from a CD when it can be done by pretty much any device these days. It's what you do with that data afterwards that makes the magic happen.
Exactly - 1's and 0's are 1's and 0's, period.
I really don't get it. A CD is a digital medium on which is stored a series of 1's and 0's. If this unit just outputs what's on the CD, why is it better or worse than every other CD player which does exactly the same? Some convert to analogue, others don't.
Because when you get near the top of hi end audio, the more it looks like it belongs on the space shuttle the better it sounds. Step rite up folks and get a bottle of Dr. Fixalls elixer, cures anything, only 250,000 dollars.
A Fiat 126 and a Ferrari F60 Enzo are both cars. They have seats, four wheels and a petrol engine, yet their performances couldn't be further from eachother. The Fiat will barely break 100mph, mean while The Enzo will do over 200! Why? Superior materials, craftsmanship, aerodynamics, weight and horsepower, all in favour of the Enzo. The Fiat used inferior materials, was built on a production line, had the aerodynamics of a house brick, weighed significantly more and had a weak engine. The only thing both machines really have in common is that Fiat owns Ferrari.
Same thing with cd players. Build quality, superior components, vibration damping, better optics, higher read rates... all of these things help to make CDs sound better.
@@andygee8716 , I get what your saying, but with most things there is a point of diminishing returns. With hi end audio the curve is way more drastic than other things. And Ferrari's are like Jag, owners have 2, one to drive whilst one is in the shop. The unfortunate thing with CD's is no matter how good the playback equip. the material has been changed and changed back again, and with anything when you do that there's some loss, otherwise we could have a perpetual motion machine.
@@bradt.3555 I along with my business partner, am a high end distributer/importer/exporter. I also used to work for Dolby Laboratories, working on a high specification analogue recording system called Dolby Spectral Recording which enhanced the headroom of analogue recordings whilst lowering the noise floor. Two albums where it really shines are Sting - Dream of the Blue Turtles and Michael Jackson - Bad.
Pioneer did a series of oversampling tests in tests in the 90s and what they found was that even over 700Khz, there were favourable audible differences.
I totally understand the diminishing returns thing, both sonically and financially as this Covid thing did affect our business by a substantial margin.
Second hand pieces changing hands for a heck of a lot lower prices. The diminishing audio returns thing seems to be well accepted in high end circles, though. Most people in their proverbial right mind wouldn't spend £70,000 on a cd player, even if it came in four boxes! The same way £600,000 loudspeakers don't exactly fly off the shelf! These are niche products for dedicated audiophiles or the the 1% that want that exclusivity: that one-off product that their peers do not possess.
Hifi audio has always been subjective and devicsive and I believe that this is the most subjective topic in the genre.
As for the Space Shuttle, take a look on the net at my Oracle Delphi mk IV turntable and my Oracle CD 2500 mk IV to bolster your argument (lol).
@@andygee8716 , Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against hi end audio, or people with lotso money spending it, that's what makes our economy go. Hobbies are great, and necessary. And I remember Dolby noise reduction (DBX too). In simple terms boost the highs on recording then lower on playback which also lowers the noise floor, (or cassette hiss). Oracle's are very nice tables. To me ones like that are still giving you back something for your dollar, but that's where the curve really start's curving. The ones I think of as past diminishing return and into the realm of art are some of these things that sit on the floor and stand 4 feet high with dual counter rotating 25 pound platters,etc. With some stuff in hi end there is a point where you just can't get back more sound. Speakers I really get a kick out of. If you look at all the engineering and stuff that goes into some, the basic driver design is like when they first started. I think some of my comments are towards people who don't understand what it's about.
Cool, but archaic.
archaic but still sound better that today's players / transports - that's the funny thing...