Best Budget CD Transport 2024 - What Hi-Fi?
Stunning Audio Quality from Your CD Collection
Now finished in Lunar Grey to match the rest of the CX Series 2 range, the award-winning Cambridge Audio CXC CD transport delivers stunning audio quality from your CD collection.
If you're using an all-in-one CD player, you probably haven't heard what the CD format is capable of until you've heard Cambridge Audio's CXC V2 CD transport. The CXC V2 has been designed for efficient recovery of CD digital data with state-of-the-art error correction.
The compact disc format has been around long enough to include an enormous catalog of music of all types, and to have become very affordable. Even the most evangelical devotee of music streaming will concede there’s plenty of life in the little silver disc yet. The CXC V2 will let you extract every last drop of musical enjoyment from your CD collection.
"Punchy and Agile, With Ample Detail"
"here’s a real musicality here that can get lost on lesser players, with an organic, fluid interplay between instruments. It's punchy and agile, with ample detail retrieved in the wide, spacious soundstage," reports What Hi-Fi?, which named the CXC its Best Budget CD Transport 2024.
"If you already own an external DAC (or there is a good-quality DAC integrated in your system) we wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Cambridge CXC over a standalone CD player at this price. You'd have to spend a good deal more… to better the sound quality it offers."
It Will Transport You
There’s absolute purity of purpose to the CXC V2. It’s built to read the digital audio information on a CD with absolute, unerring accuracy, and then pass it on to a digital-to-analog convertor (such as the extremely high-quality DACs found in Cambridge’s outstanding new CXA61 and CXA81 integrated amplifiers). Every CXC component is focused only on extracting every iota of information from the disc in its tray.
Class Leading Jitter Rejection and Error Correction
The disc drive in the CXC V2 was originally developed by Cambridge Audio for its high-end 851C CD player. It’s our renowned ‘S3’ servo design, and it has class-leading levels of jitter rejection and error correction. No multi-purpose drive is able to compete with the CXC’s levels of precision and stability.
No Digital-to-Analog Conversion Onboard
The CXC V2 requires an outboard DAC or connection to a component with an internal DAC, because it lacks its own internal DAC and has digital outputs only (S/PDIF coaxial and TOSLINK optical). This pristine approach takes maximum advantage of the reference quality transport mechanism, servo, and other premium internal components used in the CXC.
The Perfect Partner for CXC-Series Amplifiers
With no digital-to-analog conversion in the CXC V2, when it is used in conjunction with CX Series amplifiers, the CXC outputs the CD signal in digital form from the player to your Cambridge Audio amplifier, using the high quality Wolfson DAC in a CXA amplifier for the crucial digital to analog conversion stages.