Minimalist PMC AML:1 based setup - opinions needed

Just wanted to chime in on my experience with the SB vs Transporter.

I have a fairly decent system, B&W 703's connected to a McIntosh MA6900. My music collection is encoded in the lossless FLAC format.

I bought a Transporter at a good price to replace my SB3. To my ears after countless A/B comparison I could not hear a difference between the two. I had to keep the Transporter because the sale was final but if the situation was different I would have kept the SB and looked at something else.

Yes the Transporter is more feature packed but to my ears I could hear no sound/music improvement.

Just wanted to chime in on my experience with the SB vs Transporter

Technology for digital source is getting extremely good and differences are becoming vanishingly small. Design engineers can only spend so much on power supplies and higher quality components. Often more expensive products just have better features and are built beautifully and expensively packaged - of course they eek out a small degree of less jitter and better channel separation etc. - but differences are often small. What you report is not all that surprising although most people are naturally predisposed to rate the beautifully packaged item as sounding much better.

FWIW - I think the Transporter looks way cool! The build quality and features are awesome. It is worth if for that great look alone as well as the comfort that it is made from very high quality components. May be with headphones you can hear a slight difference?

I would go for the benchmark dac usb with inbuilt pre amp.
I use dac 1 usb myself. I would not suggest you buy anything more expenisive with these speakers as it works great with them. I has max output at 0.7 volts in. That the dac 1 supply. I would buy the pre amp version though.

There is no such thing as a jitter imune dac its complete sales BS, also there are several diffrent kinds of jitter .

Further more when the dac and data sourch issent slaved to the same Closck , all kinds of audio degrading things happens.

For pure soundkvality by all means get the Linn , the difference is not subbel compared to the slimdevices products .

But the linn userplatform is at its current stae crap compared to the slimdevices platform so if thats of big concern its proberly not the way to go (yet)

I agree that musicaly the trasnporter issent better then the sb3 infact i find the sb3 a littel more relaxed.

There is no such thing as a jitter imune dac its complete sales BS, also there are several diffrent kinds of jitter

While I agree that nothing will be completely jitter free, however, in the case of the DAC1, the sales BS is backed up by measurements using audio precision equipment - while not perfect (what is?) the measurements demonstrate what most would call excellent "immunity to jitter".

When comparing good DAC's as you have could it be possible you are hearing small differences between them in the analog output circuitry (op amps) and low pass filter design rather than differences due to jitter?