Welcome to the club! The club of frustration. There is no doubt that the transport can make a difference to the sound, because I just experienced that myself. (You'll see that others, even professional reviewers, find that the transport or file streamer influences the sound). Ideally the DAC should rectify all the bits and banish all jitter even from the digital cable, and present perfect sound but that does not seem to happen even with good quality Dacs of today.
Differences between cd transports?
Howdy,I borrowed a dedicated CD transport (Musical Fidelity) from a friend. I have found that music sounds much better with his transport than with the CD player I’ve been using to spin CDs. In both cases, I am using exactly the same DAC via the optical out connection from the transport and the CD player. So: is there any rational reason that, using the same digital to analog converter, one CD spinner should sound much better than another?Thanks!