If you have a "kick booty" DAC, does the transport

I've always been of the opinion that if a transport really does make a huge difference, then we need to move rapidly to a different read/transport mechanism than the traditional transport. Reading from digital media and delivering to a high quality DAC should be a straight-forward, extremely reliable process.

I've always been very satisfied with Sony DVD players as transports, but drive most of my music from a music server with a digital output now. Once ripped from the CD to the HD, getting the information off the disc and out the digital output should be error free. If you use a USB DAC, then the USB interface introduces synchronized clocking and two-way communication which, again, should allow for error free transfer. If it didn't work reliably, then you wouldn't be successful using USB ports to transfer data to an external HD, or camera, or whatever.

I will admit to never spending much time experimenting with different transports or digital cables - the bit of experimenting I did do didn't yield many differences of any magnitude, and it was clear to me that digital source would gravitate to HD-based systems, at least for me. Maybe transports and/or cables make a difference - I still wouldn't spend any extra money on a dedicated transport at this point.

I'm not sure all the attributes are the same - reading a HD reliably is basically a sure thing, while reading a CD in a transport in real-time apparently isn't a sure thing, or even close to it. What is the same, in a standard setup, is the transport from the reading device to the DAC, which is likely to be SPDIF in both cases, which creates an opportunity for error that should be equivalent in each approach. Still, the HD should be somewhere between somewhat and vastly more accurate than the CD / transport combo.

We need ethernet-enabled audio preamps and processors. Any error introduced by SPDIF would be eliminated, and we'd have the same technology from digital source to analog output as is used in bazillions of other applications where perfect transfer of data is considered a given.

Is the complexity due to the nature of how Transports, output stages and cabling is currently implemented for the purposes of digital audio? The notion of bits-are-bits comes, for me, from the notion that in any other application of computers, I take for granted the transfer of a set of binary data from one circuit board to another in bit-perfect fashion. All sorts of things I do every day would not work, or not work nearly as well, if this wasn't the case.

So, my point has always been, if the current transport-output stage-cable is so flawed as to introduce such widely audible differences, why wouldn't we first engineer a basic transport to accomplish in audio what we take for granted elsewhere?

I'm not an EE, so I could easily just be not understanding something. But I collect, route and deliver digital information globally as a profession, and it would just seem that audible mishandling of the data in a three-foot digital audio connection should either 1) be able to leverage the technologies so cheap and prevalent in other digital data applications, or 2) I should be spending huge portions of my day dealing with errors in my data transfer applications, which I don't.