After decommissioning my Oppo player, I felt nostalgic for the beautiful Cambridge Audio I had before (which, incidentally, is now hard to find and sells for much more than I sold it for). So I started looking for an old Cambridge Audio player to use as a reading mechanism, in memory of my old CD6. Nowadays, the even older CD4 is perhaps the most highly regarded, having been designed by the famous John Westlake, who later moved on to Audiolab. At the modest price I could afford, the CD5s were available, but they are still older than the CD6. Then I happened to read an excellent review in TNT-Audio, my magazine of choice, of the Cambridge Audio D500SE.
Cambridge Audio D500SE
I first went for a D300SE at 50 euros shipping included. But it was shipped in just a cellophane wrap. It could not read CDs at all, no matter what I tried to solve the issue. I claimed my money back for the poor packaging and I found a more honest add about a D500SE whose outputs were silent but the digital ones were working fine. Same price, great packaging assured, so I went for it.
The finely assembled insides of the D500SE, with the highly visible toroidal transformer and servo mechanism exclusively designed by Sony for Cambridge Audio
In my current situation I couldn’t ask for more. If digital technology in 20 years has made great strides, no big deal, the D500SE seems to be an excellent Sony transport with specially designed servo mechanism. The player has BNC and Toslink digital outputs. The former is considered the best solution, superior even to RCA (optical is the worst standard, to be used only if there is no other choice). So I took a good RCA-BNC cable and connected the D500SE to my humble but honest Pro-Ject DacBox E.
In 2025, the lack of a remote control, the weak and poor display, and doubts about the condition of the mechanics prompted me to keep looking. In reality, I only need a CD transport, any modern Blu-ray player with digital output would do. But I don’t like them. Thinking back to my old CDs, the robustness of the Pioneer PD8500 is still a fond memory. It is rarely found second-hand and is overpriced. However, I found the PD-S series, also from the 1990s, interesting: Pioneer’s idea was to reverse the reading system and rotate the CD with the data side facing upwards, making it more stable and, in a sense, more similar to a record. I found a refurbished PD S603 in excellent condition (with remote control!) on eBay Germany. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have an SPDIF digital output, only an optical one, but never mind, I would have connected it to the DAC anyway…
An interlude – for a few months I used a nice Pioneer PD S603 with Stable Platter mechanics from the 90s; unfortunately, equipped with only an optical digital output, it lost out to the Cambridge, which has a coaxial BNC output.
What surprised me most was how the sound from the Pioneer’s analogue outputs was significantly better than that from the Toslink via the more modern ProJect DAC. I couldn’t believe my ears! A player from the 90s was outperforming a DAC from the 2000s! Okay, the ProJect is a cheap DAC… definitely the weak link in my system. So after some time, I finally found the right opportunity and bought a used Schiit Modius. The DAC, which received excellent reviews on my reference TNT-Audio, is definitely better!
With the new DAC, the situation was reversed: the Cambridge sounded clearly better from its coaxial BNC output. The Pioneer only had the optical output and sounded quite clearly less dynamic and defined (a sound quite similar to that of the Cambridge when also connected via Toslink – the limitations of the optical connection compared to the coaxial one became clear to me, mainly due to poorer jitter management).
So I became reacquainted with my D500SE and took it to a workshop for servicing. I bought an original remote control from England and a nice 75 ohm BNC-RCA cable from Mogami with gold-plated Canare connectors.