EMM Labs CDSA and CDSD Upgrades

Our CDSA just got back, a few days ago now as we let it warm up and start breaking in… again, from getting the latest upgrade offered by EMM Labs.

The upgrade consists of a new German transport, new machined feet for the chassis, and a new bezel on the transport door. The upgrade retails for $1500 and is available only for CDSA’s and CDSD’s made in the last year or two. The CDSA is now shipped only with the upgrade and now costs $11,500 USD. The CDSD SE similarly goes up to $9,900 USD [these are only two in a raft of price increases we are receiving from most manufacturers].

This is the current setup with the upgraded CDSA SE. It is actually sitting on tall HRS Nimbus Couplers, not the new machined feet, and for lack of an extra platform, on the carpet there. That is a Nordost Brahma power cord on the CDSA and Elrod on the Audio Note Ongaku. Along with Stealth INDRA interconnects and Nordost ODIN speaker cable this is a darn simple system. We like these three piece systems [Kharma Mini Exquisites as the 3rd piece in this case].

They are so, simple. They sound good. They don’t cost a lot in interconnects and equipment racks and are visually appealing.

The name tag remains the same.

The bezel looks slightly different?

The machined feet are significantly more robust, wider and heavier looking.

Now a bunch of photos of the new transport. Much more robust feeling and looking.

A lot more metal and less plastic.

I have no idea what the 6, 9 is doing on the Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms CD – or even whether it is something Neli wrote or is on all CDs.

How does it sound? Well cold, out of the box, it sounded pretty good – but it has been a few weeks without our CDSA now and we missed it dearly – so I think the old model would have sounded pretty good at this point.

But we will do a better job as it is now warmed up and has 24 – 48 hours on it. A few more days…

And hopefully we can rescue more equipment from all the other shootouts we are running here simultaneously.

We got the:

* New Elrod power cord versus new Elrod power cord with a week or two on the Nordost Vidar cable burner test running.

* We got the Walker Proscenium Gold Signature versus the Audio Note TT3 Reference turntable shootout always running

* We got the Lamm LP2 photo stage versus the one in the Audio Note M1 preamplifier [Yes, I know which one is probably going to win, Neli, but I want to hear HOW it wins :-)].

* We still have the rerun of the recent interconnect shootout but not as digital cables, not as tonearm cables, but as honest ordinary interconnects

* We want to do a shootout between the Kharma and Audio Note SEC Signature speakers [yes, I know they are very different, but the new completely upgraded AN speakers should compete in the basic areas of frequency extension and overall resolution, trading efficiency and dynamics for upper midrange uber resolution – but I want to hear that they do].

* And then there is the new Audio Note Kegon Balanced versus the Ongaku versus the older high-gain Kegons.

And we will most likely have an older 6 month old or so CDSA here to do a shootout against the upgraded CDSA quite soon.

And the real problem is many of these have to run on one of the two major systems [and we like to be somewhat familiar with the sound of the system in a large sense to do the shootout in order to have a slightly higher level of confidence in our findings – so we can’t do too many changes, too fast] -and so we got a complex traffic jam on component substitutions planned that we really could use an advanced project scheduling tool to manage – if we didn’t hate these tools so much [long story, to do with idiot managers… need we say more? :-)].