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

My DAC is pretty old, (Counterpoint DA-10a)....still, I could clearly hear the difference between the three players and one dedicated transport I have tried with it.

There would be cases I'd think where you may hear little or no difference for other reasons, ie...your system, or...the two transports are very equal in build...just guessing here?

To be honest, I was surprised myself. The player I had intended to use as a transport is a fairly heavy and well built Technics DVD A-10 that I had no other use for...a cheap little Pioneer wiped the floor with the Technics?

I'm now using an old Kinergetics dedicated transport...it added some meat to the bones that I thought was the Pioneers biggest weakness...kick drums, ect. now have the proper heft.

Dave

Like anything else here it will boil down to do you feel it WILL help, you may not hear a diffrence and it certainly wont be night and day....but maybe you will hear a better sound, or atleast think you do. I know guys that use Sony DVD players as transports and they sound awesome into a DAC.

Yes it matters very much.
It all starts at the Extractment of the Data.
A DAC's limiting factor, is the quality of the data its fed.

Anthony

in theory, a hard drive is just a high capacity disk fixed permanently in a transport, aside from differences in the data retrieval mechanism (laser) and buffer. almost all attributes of a state of the art transport should apply to a state of the art hard drive. imagine using an Esoteric/TEAC chasis and spinning mechanism plus the JVC/XRCD24 data transport process to create a hard drive...that would be one awesome sounding source!

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.