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

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.

i am not so sure that data retrieval from a hard drive is any more reliable than a cd transport when the quality of the disc, laser pickup, and spinning mechanism is the same. according to my very limited knowledge of electronics and computers, read and write errors occur often when spinning a hard drive, although we may not notice the effect of some (software hiccups, delays, crashes...). i believe there is no device that guarantees perfect data transfer available for consumers as of yet.

elements that i think are crucial for data retrieval are:
1. disc quality and condition
2. reading mechanism (laser)
3. speed and stability of spinning mechanism
4. power management
5. vibration control

please correct me if i am wrong.