Mission 778CDT Transport

 CD’s Mission statement

Hot on the heels of the 778S music streamer, Mission further expands its compact 778 Series with the 778CDT transport – precision engineered to make the most of treasured CD collections...

Cambridgeshire, England – Mission, one of Britain’s best-loved loudspeaker brands, adds a CD transport to its 778 Series of compact audio electronics. The 778CDT joins the popular 778X integrated amplifier and recently announced 778S music streamer, completing the lineup.

The 778X amp includes an excellent built-in DAC, so it is entirely logical for Mission to develop a matching CD transport. After all, with plenty of music lovers still cherishing large CD collections amassed over many years, and CDs continuing to outsell vinyl in the UK despite the latter’s celebrated revival, the original mass-market digital audio format retains an important place among the various ways people choose to enjoy music at home.

The 778CDT sports the same half-width ‘shoebox’ format as its 778 Series siblings (236x96x357mm,WxHxD), with a symmetrically arranged front panel and dimmable OLED display. Physically, it is the perfect CD spinner to include in an all-Mission hi-fi system with a delightfully compact aesthetic.

What’s more, with its offer of excellent engineering and superb sonics in return for a sub-£500 price tag, the 778CDT is the ideal affordable CD transport to partner any high-performance DAC, or amp with digital inputs, from any audio brand you choose.

Engineered for excellence

The 778CDT’s design is entirely focused on the mechanics of exemplary data retrieval and signal integrity through elevated engineering. Compared to CD players, which incorporate DAC and analogue output circuitry in the same chassis as the disc transport mechanism, it delivers the sonic benefit of separating the transport hardware from the DAC to reduce the impact of electrical noise and interference on the music signal.

Construction is first rate inside and out, its precision-engineered aluminium chassis, internal

architecture and shielded transport mechanism designed to mitigate the sonically deleterious effects of vibrations and interference. From the disc tray to the optical and coaxial digital outputs, every element has been engineered for high durability and uncompromised fidelity.

At the heart of the 778CDT lies a high-precision CD mechanism and custom-designed CD servo control system, developed to ensure stable disc rotation and clean tracking. Every aspect of the laser assembly and servo has been optimised to minimise read errors, jitter and other forms of distortion, delivering a pristine signal to the connected DAC for maximum sound quality.

The CD servo and control architecture is engineered with a robust dual-core processing framework, featuring a high-performance 32-bit RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) CPU and a dedicated MCU. This configuration ensures precise servo control and reliable error correction.

Power without corruption

Incorporating a high-quality, ultra-low-noise toroidal transformer, Mission has designed the internal power architecture to isolate critical pathways. Power supplies to the motor and laser servo circuits are separated from the decoder stage that processes the digital audio signal, ensuring the data stream is clean and stable before it is synchronised and formatted.

A TCXO (Temperature-Compensated Crystal Oscillator) provides an ultra-precise master clock for the servo and decoder section. Powered by its own independent, ultra-low-noise linear regulator and grounding scheme to eradicate power supply induced jitter, it acts as a rock-solid timing reference. This ensures that the extracted S/PDIF digital output is stable and free of timing errors, delivering audibly cleaner transients, tighter imaging and greater musical coherence.

Modern versatility

There was a time when CD players or transports would only play regular ‘Red Book’ 16-bit/44.1kHz CDs, a standard established in 1980 to enable the storage of up to 74 minutes and 44 seconds of high- quality digital audio on a 12cm optical disc. The 778CDT offers greater versatility, also playing CD-R, CD-RW and data CDs, and incorporating a USB-A port at the back to plug in USB storage devices – FLAC, WAV, WMA, AAC, MP3 and APE audio files are supported.

As with data read from CDs, audio files accessed from USB devices benefit from the 778CDT’s

sophisticated internal design, including the same high-precision clock system and low-noise output architecture, and a dedicated power supply to the USB input.

Spinning around

With high-quality construction and internal architecture that maximises the sonic potential of every disc you spin, the Mission 778CDT CD transport is available from late January in a choice of black or silver, at an RRP of £449.

The 778CDT can also be purchased with the 778S music streamer at a special package price of £1,099 – a saving of £149.

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