John Darko
New from Shanling: the CR60 is an all-new affordable CD transport with a TOSLINK, coaxial and – less common – USB-A digital output. The latter means two things: 1) the CR60 can send the CD’s digital stream out to a DAC kitted out with only a USB input, including many dongle DACS, and 2) any DAC with an asynchronous USB input will handle the digital signal’s clocking — not the CR60 itself.
The business end of the CR60 features a slide-out tray – not a slot – which puts the CD inside a Philips drive unit to be read by a Sanyo HD850 laser. The unit is powered by a second USB socket or (optionally) a 12V DC brick. An infrared remote control is also supplied.
One of the joys of buying a CD is that it is a double-sided listening experience. We can play a CD on a traditional CD player and then rip its contents to a hard drive to stream around the house and/or copy/paste the resulting files to a portable player.
This brings us to the CR60’s twist. It can be switched into ‘CD ripper’ mode on the rear panel to losslessly auto-rip a CD to a directly attached USB drive or execute a user-managed rip to a PC or Mac (where presumably the Shanling device shows up as an external CD drive). The Chinese company’s Eddict app will even facilitate lossless ripping directly to Android smartphones or Shanling portable players, complete with metadata management.
The price isn’t too scary either: US$269. Shipping begins before the end of September.
Further information: Shanling
