Panic! At the disc-o: Quad's retro CD transport makes me want to spend all my money on CDs

• Designed to perfectly match the Quad 3 integrated amp
• CD, CD-R, CD-RW and data discs with the key digital formats
• £599 (about $797 / €685 / AU$1,199)

If there's one thing I love more than great-sounding audio kit, it's great-sounding audio kit that also looks gorgeous. Quad's 3 series of hi-fi products fit firmly in that second category, and now there's a new retro-inspired CD transport that's just as beautiful as its siblings.

The new transport is called the Quad 3CDT, and it's designed to match the Quad 3 integrated DAC and amp – although of course you can use it with any DAC. It has the same white, silver and orange colors of the Quad 3 and has the same compact footprint too.

In addition to the 16-bit/44.1kHz CD format, the Quad 3CDT also works with CD-R, CD-RW and data CDs containing FLAC, WAV, WMA, MP3 and APE files.

Quad 3CDT: key features and pricing

This is a transport, so there's no built-in DAC; keeping that hardware separate and external eliminates potential sources of distortion and noise.

As you'd expect from Quad it's a high-quality affair with precision engineering and a shielded transport mechanism. The custom-designed CD servo control has been optimized to minimise read errors, jitter and other forms of distortion, Quad tells us, and the result is a "pristine" signal for your DAC.

The power supply is an ultra-low noise toroidal transformer with an internal power architecture that isolates critical pathways. The laser servo circuit and the motor circuit are kept apart from the decoder stage that does the digital audio processing, while a temperature-controlled crystal oscillator provides the master clock for the servo and decoder. That's powered by its own ultra-low-noise linear regulator and grounding scheme that Quad says eliminates power supply-induced jitter and delivers a "rock-solid" timing reference.

The Quad 3CDT will be available from mid-December with a recommended price of £599 (about $797 / €685 / AU$1,199).

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