The ultimate CD transport

There are lots of listening options available to music lovers these days — smartphones, portable MP3 players, even Internet radio on our computers — but when we have time to devote our full attention to the music, most of us still turn to our trusted collection of CDs for the best sound quality possible. Yet even CD sound leaves many audiophiles cold, not always delivering the natural warmth and richness of the finest analog and high-resolution digital music sources, such as vinyl or SACD. PS Audio says, don't blame the CD, blame the player. Years of digital playback R & D led them to create the PerfectWave Transport. This revolutionary disc player will extract both standard and high-resolution audio stored on your CDs or DVDs, and send it as bit-perfect digital audio data to your favorite outboard digital-to-analog converter for a sonic experience that you'll have to hear to believe. Here's how it works.

Each beautifully crafted Transport is individually hand-built by PS Audio in Boulder, Colorado.

A better way to spin your discs

When a CD player reads music off of a disc, it's far from the surgically precise process it might seem to be. All kinds of things can go wrong — imperfectly stamped discs, wobbly or eccentric discs, scratched discs that scatter laser light, etc. These imperfections wind up interfering with playback, creating errors in the timing of the data stream called "jitter" that can adversely affect sound quality. Jitter can make music sound harsh and edgy, and smear subtle details. Standard CD players compound this problem because they only get one chance to read a disc, errors and all. From there on any unwanted artifacts introduced into the data stream have to be corrected by a software error correction process. That process isn't perfect and it too can degrade sound quality.

PS Audio developed a better way to get the music off your discs. Its PerfectWave Transport takes many of the problems faced — or created — by standard players, and eliminates them. Instead of reading a disc just once, it can re-read a CD or data DVD as many times as needed to capture the music with 100% precision, eliminating the need for error correction. The bit-perfect music data is then separated from the digital clock signal and collected jitter-free by the Transport's Digital Lens, a 64MB internal memory buffer that temporarily stores the music in raw digital form without any embedded clock data or reference to time.

Finally, the music information is retrieved from the buffer by the Transport's separate high-precision timing clock and then passed through the Transport's digital audio connections to your DAC with perfect timing and extremely low jitter. And if you're connected to PS Audio's PerfectWave™ DAC via HDMI, your music even comes through completely jitter-free. You'll hear stunning levels of detail and transparency, along with a sense of "realness" on every disc in your library.

The color touchscreen display provides convenient access to the tracks on your discs.

Network-connected with a color touchscreen display

The PerfectWave Transport's network-capable design can download cover art and song titles from PS Audio's GlobalNet™ servers and display them on its front-panel touchscreen for easy viewing and playback control. Now instead of choosing among just track numbers like you would on a standard CD player, you can select each song by its proper name.

You can also use your PC to add, delete, and edit any of the song titles and cover art associated with your discs. Artwork and song data for each disc is stored on the included SD memory card for instant recall the next time you pop that disc into the Transport. The SD card also stores firmware updates to keep your Transport up to date with the latest software from PS Audio.

Complement your PerfectWave Transport with the PerfectWave DAC

The Transport works perfectly with any outboard digital-to-analog converter. Your choice of optical, coaxial, and even professional XLR digital outputs ensures a good match with the highest quality DACs available. But where the Transport truly shines is when you use its I²S (pronounced "I squared S") output via HDMI. This connection delivers the highest signal quality possible for digital audio data transfer. Here's why.

The PerfectWave DAC makes an ideal companion for the Transport.

When the digital audio signal from a CD player is sent over an optical, coaxial, or XLR connection, the audio bits and clock data are combined in order to fit on a single cable. When the signal reaches a DAC, the data must be separated. The encoding and decoding of this complex data is never perfect, and the resulting inaccuracies create timing errors and jitter that can degrade sound quality.

The PerfctWave Transport works together with the matching PerfectWave DAC to avoid those drawbacks altogether. The engineers at PS Audio found a way to a transfer the separate data streams from the player to the DAC via the multi-conductor design of a standard HDMI cable, eliminating the process of combining and then separating the data. This completely bypasses the problem of jitter, working wonders for the sound of your CDs.