A CD transport kit built around a mechanism actually still in production — not a decommissioned laptop drive, not a clone of a clone, and not something you have to gut a boombox to find.
For over a decade, a small corner of DIY audio has hand-built CD transports from scratch — pulling matched mechanisms and chipsets out of donor hardware, wiring up custom boards, and mounting the result in enclosures they machined themselves. It worked, because the donor parts happened to share hardware with far more expensive commercial transports. It also had an expiration date: the donor hardware stopped being made, the chips went obsolete, and what's left to buy new are unbranded clone mechanisms of inconsistent quality. We're building the kit that hobby never got to have.
Our kit is built around a mechanism and servo platform still in active production and support — not a repurposed consumer part, and not an orphaned design nobody stands behind anymore. You assemble it into your own enclosure, with your own power supply and DAC. We're not selling you a finished chassis, and we're not pretending to have solved problems we haven't gotten to yet — what we're building is the transport hardware worth building one around.
A disc mechanism and servo platform still in production and supported — not a discontinued part you're hoping doesn't fail.
An enclosure, a power supply, and a DAC. You're building a transport, not buying a finished component.
Early kits are going out to established DIY-audio builders to document real assembly experience — not marketing copy, actual build threads.
A future revision will add our own control and output electronics for builders who want more than a bare mechanism. That's a next step, not a promise attached to what ships first.
We're currently sourcing components and finalizing our first kit run. If you've built a transport by hand before — a hand-modified drive, anything held together with more patience than manual — we'd like to hear what worked and what didn't. Reach out, and we'll get back to you from the bench.
