Tangent CDII....Nice.

[Cressy Snr]

Visited Richer Sounds in York on Thursday and came away with a Tangent CDII mini CD player for £149.
My old and decrepit Sony CDP930-XB had gone to meet its maker and as the missus and me were in York on an OAP coach trip, she (not me) decided it would be a good time to replace the shagged out Sony with something a bit more modern, and when she saw the price it was nuff said. She hates using the computer and hates Apple Music even more.

This designed in Denmark, made in China, player has no programming, no display and is a black box with a slot on the front to take the CD. Controls are stop, pause, start, forward 1, back 1. You insert a CD and it plays: thats it! This is hair shirt CD playback taken to its absolute limits.

As we can see it’s tiny.
Below a bit more detail:

The amount of music that comes out of this black box is staggering considering the price.
Great service from the guys at the York branch goes without saying.
Only fly-in-the-ointment is it doesn’t do gapless playback, so your Floyd stuff and your live albums are royally fooked.

Apart from that silly problem. The Tangent is a great sounding player for less than the price of a good MM cart, and these days I’m thankful such bargains exist.
Maybe Nick could make a few bob hacking the firmware to enable gapless.

[IslandPink]

That's v.interesting. Does it have digital out ? - would be ideal for feeding the DAC when my CD player pops its clogs.

Edit - oh hang on, are you saying it won't play CD's without gaps, at all ?

[Cressy Snr]

That's v.interesting. Does it have digital out ? - would be ideal for feeding the DAC when my CD player pops its clogs.

Edit - oh hang on, are you saying it won't play CD's without gaps, at all ?

Yes, it has an optical out. And yes, unfortunately, it puts a split second of silence at the track cues, on albums where the tracks run into each other, eg DSOTM. Mahler 8. If you like for example prog or opera, it would be a deal breaker. Given the sound quality on offer, that’s a shame.

[Ray P]

There's a matching amp too, called, wait for it, 'Ampster'.

May not be a good partnership with your 13E1s though...

[Cressy Snr]

There's a matching amp too, called, wait for it, 'Ampster'.

May not be a good partnership with your 13E1s though...

Too right! I put my solid state amp in the system last week. I lasted half an hour before ‘transistor ear’ reared its head. The 13E1 OTL went back in smartish. I can’t listen to anything but single tube OTLs with multiple power supplies now dammit!

[Cressy Snr]

I found a workaround for the gapless playback issue with the Tangent CDII.

I decided to try DSOTM as a guinea pig for a little experiment:
I’d found instructions on the web from Mac expert Kirk McElhearn, on how to rip a CD to a single file using iTunes. It’s one of those hidden features that has been there since the year dot, but I’d never needed it until now; why would I?

Insert CD into the drive, then select it when it appears and iTunes has fetched its track info. Cmd-A (Mac) or Ctrl-A (Windows) selects all the tracks, then using the gear symbol at the right of the window, select the “Join Tracks” option from the drop-down menu. Import the CD and it shows up as a single track once the import is complete.

The single file is then burned to a CDR and, no gaps when the CDR is played on the Tangent player.

As the Tangent has no track display it made no difference that the album was a single file. It’s a workaround that shouldn’t be necessary, but it works perfectly and you only have to do it once for each CD that has segued tracks.
The CDR can be stored in the caddy with the original CD. I just labelled mine “ DSOTM single file version” Job done.
Abbey Road next, but not tonight.