This is my take. The quality of the transport mechanism alone does NOT guarantee it'll outperform higher end CDP's.
The crux of this DIY CDP is the very solid chassis and a custom fabricated clamp for top loading the disc. A solid chassis can be custom fabricated to be most stable and with least resonance than any common cd player chassis which most are anything from tin can to 16G steel chassis framework. Vibration, unstability, chassis resonance can affect the performance greatly and your tweaking of the electronics will be limited. The worse the quality of the chassis, sound quality will be just as bad. As for the cd clamp, most cdp loader clamps are mere moulded metal plastic combination or just light plastic. I'm confident if a budget to mid end CDP is converted from its flimsy plastic front loader to manual top loading. Together with an appropriate weighted clamp, the SQ and imaging can improve by some percentage without anything done elsewhere. This is one of the primary qualities of a high performance CDP.
One fine example is SONY ES series top loading CDP which supply an appropriate metal cd clamp piece as standard. I know someone who gets different clamps made to order and have spent quite a lot of time with different materials, size and own tweaks that affect the SQ to various degrees.
Back to the optical mechanism, me thinks that JVC optic mechanism is no better than the common SONY KSS-213CCM found in many CDP's such as budget to mid priced Marantz, NAD, Cambridge Audio, Rotel, etc.
Some years ago, there was the Philips CDM Pro kit that can also be used to DIY your own CD transport, but the setback was that it was quite and expensive kit, not to mention optional controller and all. I have to admire the chassis example in the picture as a very solid candidate for great performance. I feel it shouldn't be anything lesser if anyone insists on this DIY project.

Anyway, I'll look here once a while to see if anyone can make good here. Good luck guys!.

This post has been edited by bsl555: Oct 20 2008, 02:08 AM

What about the disc clamp?.. will that be separate from chassis quote?