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Re: Audio Note Transport Line Discontinued?

212.42.175.73

Posted by Peter Qvortrup on March 20, 2004 at 02:43:52

In Reply to: Audio Note Transport Line Discontinued? posted by BIOMAN on March 19, 2004 at 10:49:47:

Dear Bioman,

It is correct, we are no longer producing transports, I have decided not to replace any of the CD player/transport products going forward from March 15 and have stopped development on the new CDT Two and CDT Three transports. This decision was reached for two, quite different, but related reasons:

1.) Scarce and unreliable parts supply - Sony has gone out of the dedicated CD transport business. Philips is still in the hunt for the time being, but there is no real guarantee that they will stay as they have a long history of reversing decisions.

Any of the smaller players who are still engaged in making and selling CD transports/players has a serious problem getting a guaranteed and continuous parts supply. That not only makes it difficult to manufacture them in the first place, which is bad enough, but it puts our ability to service these products over the next 3 - 5 years in serious doubt.

Audio Note's product strategy cannot co-exist with a situation where the majority of the key parts used in some of our products become unavailable at moment's notice, we seek permanence and choose technology and suppliers that allow us to develop products with long product life, we go to great length and take pains to be able to support our products for years after they were purchased, our tube stock, our upgrade program, our generous trade-in allowances all speak to that. We don't want to lead our customers down a garden path, only to find ourselves unable to satisfy their needs sometime in the middle distance. It appears we will not be able to avoid doing just that with transports and players in the future, and that is not acceptable, to me or to my customers.

It will undoubtedly cause some consternation in the near term, but, as usual Audio Note and I are not taking the shortterm view. From a longer perspective, it is the more responsible course of action for us as manufacturers and purveyors of investment grade audio gear.

2.) A secondary, but still impactful reason rises from the amount of support that CD transports require, whether they are faulty or not. In general, we see about 6 fault-free transports returned to the UK for "repair" for every one that has a genuine problem and whilst this is still only about 4 - 5% of sales, the "hidden costs" of this are not only enormous, but very time consuming. If they were added to the cost of sales, this would raise the price of all our CD transports/players significantly. In turn, this would further fuel arguments about our pricing.

Unfortunately it is a fact that the more accurately the transport's reading window is set up, the more easily the player finds all manners of faults in the discs from pressing flaws to copy right protection encoding, to CDR that have not been encoded properly not to mention the preponderance of poorly “copied” counterfeit CDs in some markets are all major causes of these "reading" problems.

Combine that with an error correction circuit which is not allowed to continually interfere with the replay, (as happens in most CD players regardless of price, and especially in the latest crop of DVD/SACD machines), then you will get better sound on one hand but more incidents of skipping on the other. All manners of electrical interference, frequently from ubiquitous computer power supplies, is another ghost in the machine, which does not travel along with an offending unit, and one which will likely repeat itself in the same environment with any equivalent transport we supply.

These are problems which, when combined and given the direction and state of the supply chain and general marketplace, appears to be ones we would be wise not to try to apply band-aid solutions to.

We do realize that it causes some difficulty having DACs without matching transports, but we will continue to work toward an alternate solution, which before you ask is NOT a combined DVD/SACD/CD machine, the quality that these yield on pure CD replay is laughable, so do NOT kid yourself or believe any of the claims made to the contrary.

Hope this clarifies.

Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup

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