I see you have an elac streamer. I guess I’m not certain whether that has a CD transport in it or not, and if it does why you want another.
if the answer is "it doesn't" - then: Laptop. Rip the CDs FLAC/ALAC. Send them to elac or play back bit-perfect via USB which puts the DAC in charge of timing. more convenient, better sound than almost any thing using SPDIF.
Probably worth a sidebar to explain that traditional digital interfaces "SPDIF" depended on the jitter performance of the sending transport. Bad transport bad jittery. Modern USB is the reverse - you could send the bits with HUGE jitter and it will generally matter not one bit. Its all re-clocked by the DAC. IN general SPDIF is now to be avoided....and the assumptions of the sonic contributions of transports partially or mostly discarded. Noise does still matter though - for reasons i don't fully get.
I think Windows finally handles high res USB profiles better in 10, but generally Macs have had the best performance as the digital source, along with ROON/Linux (especially ROCK). On a Mac iTunes with Bitperfect ($10) sounds phenomenal, although iTunes is pretty awful for classical (it s really set up for pop and rock - artist --> album --> song rather than Piece --> orchestra --> performance or other variants.
G
if the answer is "it doesn't" - then: Laptop. Rip the CDs FLAC/ALAC. Send them to elac or play back bit-perfect via USB which puts the DAC in charge of timing. more convenient, better sound than almost any thing using SPDIF.
Probably worth a sidebar to explain that traditional digital interfaces "SPDIF" depended on the jitter performance of the sending transport. Bad transport bad jittery. Modern USB is the reverse - you could send the bits with HUGE jitter and it will generally matter not one bit. Its all re-clocked by the DAC. IN general SPDIF is now to be avoided....and the assumptions of the sonic contributions of transports partially or mostly discarded. Noise does still matter though - for reasons i don't fully get.
I think Windows finally handles high res USB profiles better in 10, but generally Macs have had the best performance as the digital source, along with ROON/Linux (especially ROCK). On a Mac iTunes with Bitperfect ($10) sounds phenomenal, although iTunes is pretty awful for classical (it s really set up for pop and rock - artist --> album --> song rather than Piece --> orchestra --> performance or other variants.
G