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Re: CAYIN 17t vs ORIGINAL cd-2008 vs EAST SOUND cd-e5

Sorry, I missed your earlier post about the Eastsound. I see you didn't get any replies. Not surprising. I don't know how many Eastsounds have actually made it to North America. Very few I'm sure. The future supply of 110v Eastounds is up in the air since Eastound has been aquired by Sendsound. If you live in Europe no problems getting the 220v.

I have owned the Eastsound CD-E5 since August, nothing but good to say about it. So needless to say I would recommend it above the Original and Cayin, which are also both excellent players.

My diet is probably 75% rock. It does very well with rock. Excellent slam with deep bass. The player also has a tube like midrange and extremely black soundstage.

I had one of the very first 110v Eastsounds. The distrubutor in Florida who imported my machine asked Andy at Sekei (who I bought mine from) if he could borrow it for a week or so before shipping it because he had heard such good things about the E5 and wanted to evaluate it. The distributor owns both a Shengya and Jolida CDP. Which are both tube CDP's. He was shocked when he learned it had no tubes because of the midrange.

Unlike some of the tube machines however it has bite, speed, bass and slam. Its definitly not boring or syrupy.

Highlights of the machine are:

TCCO Temperature control clock. TCCO's are fairly rare and said to be capable of keeping time 20X better then non temperature control clocks. Other machines that use TCCO type clocks are Gryphon Mikado, Mark Levinson 390S and several of the Wadia machines.

Crystal 4390 chip and DAC. Used in Gamut CD1mkII and Meridian 508.24.

Pure class A output.

Wima Blackbox power supply and filtering.

NO opamps in the RCA outputs.

Total WT. 30.8lbs.

Audiocostruzioni uses the E5 as their reference player. Some of the Chinese players they reviewed and chose it over are Original 2008SE, Xindak, Jungson, Cayin and Jolida. You can go there and find a 3 way shootout they did with the Eastsound, Cayin and Jolida.

Audioholic also did a recent review of the CD-E3 (the little brother to the E5). The E3 bettered Creeks new $1500 top of line CDP. It also bettered a $3500 Lexicon player in a 3 way shoot out.

Needless to say I did alot of research on the player before I bought it and could not be happier.

Since you mentioned Chinese HiFi. I run a Jungson JA-88D pure class A integrated amp. The build quality like the Eastsound is incredible regardless of price.

I'm not sure if you live in the States or not. If you do the only source I know of for a 110v version is Cattylink. Runs about $750 with shipping and they run each unit for 120 hours before shipping.

If I couldn't get the Eastsound or chose to go with one of the other two CDP's for Rock go with the Original. Reason being if you go to the shootout at Audiocostruzioni they found the Cayin to have great highs but not much slam or bass when run thru the tube output. When run thru the SS output Slam and bass improved but the top end performance fell off substantially.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

BW MaxxC


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