Anyone use a DVD player as a front end?

Transport quality doesn't make any difference with upsampling DACs like Benchmark DAC1. I use Benchmark DAC1 with $70 Sony DVD player with great results.

DVD players alone have history of being bad CD players since their main purpose is different (less attention paid to sound). Some are better some are worse. Oppo is one of the better ones while my Sony is not and Toshiba, I had once, was horrible. Pioneer might be decent but I suspect that other components in his system are much better than average making up for CD player.

Definition of "superior" is not clear. Many people like a little of distortion because it makes sound "lively" and not "analytical". One person liked "all together" and was bothered by hearing individual instruments in very good system. It's all very subjective (read no right or wrong). My first impression with Benchmark DAC1 driving directly power amp Rowland 102 was that some instruments on recordings, I know well, are missing. Now I realize I was missing lack of clarity. For many warm sound, no matter how bad, is heaven.

Everest_audio

I can only speak about Benchmark. Its jitter bandwidth is 3Hz and at frequencies of interest (kHz) has way over 100dB of suppression. Benchmark tested it with 1000' of digital cable and couldn't hear any difference. People that have Benchmark cannot even hear difference between coax and cheap plastic Toslink. Most of people (Benchmark forum) said that transport did not make any audible difference. I value experiment - If you find that it makes difference then get good transport. I'm just saying that some upsampling/jitter rejecting DACs might sound exactly the same wit different transports and one might feel stupid with no sonic improvements from expensive transport vs cheap DVD player. Don't buy transport first as some advise - cheap DVD player might do it (and they have great tracking).

Al - the best digital cable supposed to be 1.5m to avoid reflections from impedance boundaries coming back straight at the edge. There are Bergeron diagrams showing what happens to edge with different propagation times and slew rates.

Bob - that's great idea but I don't have any good quality transport. The other player I have (Cambridge CD4SE) uses standard Phillips CDM12 mechanism.

Idea is great because audio is very mental/suggestive and if you have very expensive transport and strongly believe that it should sound better - it will. There is nothing wrong with it but money could be used better.

Bob - I forgot to answer your question about deterministic outcome of asynchronous sample rate converter. I think that for practical purposes it is, but anytime you deal with asynchronous stuff strange things might happen. One of them is metastability. Designers fix it by making shift register that clocks signal twice to reduce chances of unknown outcome. It is a little like getting tossed coin on its edge - any flip-flop can produce delay or unknown state (in between logic levels) when clock and data change at the same time. It sound far fetched but many computer motherboards had problems because of that.