Silly Question...does a transport have a "sound" ?

Bits may be bits but once you admit that their sequence requires very precise timing you may have to swallow the sad fact that no clock is perfect. This means clocking, moving and reclocking digital signals is imperfect too. Dig deep to consider that no two of anything electrical are exactly alike. Listeners who fork over long green for the best products pay for the intensive testing, culling, segregating and matching of minute parts. Does this low tolerance for acceptable errors manifest better sound? Only you can decide that. In a world where speaker wire, its configuration, insulation, termination and even its placement are subject to intense inquiry and decision, some find that everything matters.

Hmmm.....

"Those with limited knowledge, lack listening skills, have only a basic understanding of theory with no test equipment will tell you what they think."

I guess the above statement clearly applies to me. What knowledge do I need to have to interchange transports in my system and hear or not hear a difference? I can do this with ARC, BAT and Aesthetix phono stages and hear dramatic differences immediately. I can do the same with Manley, Electrocompaniet and Muse DACs and hear as significant a difference. And the same goes for line stages, power amps, tonearm cables and interconnects between the line stage and amp....and even the "controversial power cord" on my phono stage and line stage.....immediate and dramatic differences.

"Obviously, their response is based on their limited understanding and lack of experience with the subject, not on actual observations."

So my ears and mind are biased that I will not hear a difference with transports and yet I do with power cords in my system? Come on Sean, give some of us a little more credit than this. In my quest to optimize my analog and digital sources, I have put much effort to try many products and my comments above indicated my listening observations. Whether or not I have an ascilloscope, logic analyzer, FFT spectrum analyzer, etc., will not affect whether or not I hear a difference. I replied here with my own experiences and suggested to the member here who posted this question to listen himself and not be surprised at hearing very little if at all any changes.....and I stand by that recommendation. In all honesty, I have yet to hear a superfi transport in the $5k+ range and I made this point clear in the closing of my posting. So perhaps this higher priced level where the big differences begin.

So rather than bash people here on their "incompetence", a posting on your own specific knowledge and experiences here with the differences between some transports you have tried would have brought more value to this thread.

John

Metralla - Thanks for the reference - it’s a very good read. I already know about many of the issues involved with extracting information off of a CD, and have in fact chosen to jettison my transport entirely in lieu of a PC based system with music ripped using the software described in the article. There are other issues involved with this type of system, but that's fodder for a different discussion.

The point of a transport having a signature is still at the heart of this discussion. Regardless of how well a transport reads the information from a CD, any jitter produced will represent incorrect data to the DAC, which is responsible for creating the sound as best it can with the information it gets. Different DACs can respond differently in this regard and will likely sound different in each case. When one purchases a high-end transport, the only factor in the decision should be how well it will be able to read and transmit the information on the CD. Should two high-end transports produce different streams with the same CD? They can, but I would argue they shouldn't if they can provide the necessary technology to ensure a correct read. If one compares the results from multiple transports and finds that a set of them sound the same using the same disk and DAC, I’d argue that there's a good chance that those units are reading the disk information correctly (at least within the bounds that the listener cannot perceive any differences). Multiple transports that produce audible differences are clearly not reading or propagating the exact same information to the DAC, in which case I'd conclude that most (or all) of them are producing incorrect results and are not what I would consider ‘good’ transports.

While its clear that Sony and Philips made some poor choices when they finalized the Redbook format, the knowledge of what can be done to get the information from the disk is at least understood to some degree, and its certainly incumbent on the transport manufacturers to utilize what they know to produce the best possible device. When one pays large sums for just this purpose, I'd hope that they'd get what they paid for.

Anyway, folks hear many variations in their audio systems that can be attributable to a number of factors. However, when it comes to transports, the goal should be for all of them to read the disks accurately in spite of the mechanical limitations, and for the variations to be insignificant sonically. This was the point of my previous post.

Regarding the "no physical reason" argument, a short story:

Alfred Einstein liked his pipe. One time he digs into his pocket and displays a wooden kitchen match. He shows it around and asks everyone to describe it. The listeners note it has mass, molecular composition, color etc. Then A.E. breaks the match in two. What's different about it now? he asks... The moral: the same match, broken and unbroken, exists in time...

So OK, back to those pesky electrons, ignoring any physical reason for transports to sound different, hows about a temporal one?

Kjg & Pabelson-

I respect your opinions, but there's a lot more to what a transport does than you've described.

HOW the encoded data is retrieved and processed, protected from vibration and electrical anamoloies, etc. does indeed make a difference. Trust me, the various transports I've employed were not defective, and the differences between units was audible.

Of course, I also heard diffences in swapping out power cords on some transports- more voodoo in the minds of many I'm sure!