Does the Transport make a significant difference?

I agree with Stanwal above. As you have already proven to yourself, the transport does make a difference. How much of a difference will depend upon the rest of your system.

In conjunction with trying to borrow/demo a top transport, I would also give the Cable Company a call, explain your situation and borrow some cables according to their advice. That would probably be the best place to start, give you the biggest bang for minimal dollars and the broadest exposure to many brands and types of cables. They are easy to work with when they're not too busy. Your most important cables in this case will probably be the interconnects from the transport, but you may hear other opinions as well - its really pretty system-dependent. Most importantly, trust your own ears. Hope this helps.

Hi there
The SB3 in stock form is a fairly average transport and improves a great deal with a simple pulse transformer mod to clean up the RF. I prefer my modded SB3 as a transport to my Transporter (although AES out is very close).
Equally important is a good cable - not necc expensive but good in terms of a match. I use a $5 cable which sounds better than some $300 IC's I tried.
No question that Transports designed to work with a purpose built Dac eg Esoteric, dCS etc will give you significant improvements in resolution - the issue is whether the rest of your system will let you hear it.
Cheers
Andrew

YMMV and there will be others here who may not agree, but...

In my case, I have a quality transport, a CEC TL2. In My Experience, does a transport make a significant difference...Absolutely. It is still one of the most significant upgrades I have made. Note that I did not say biggest, or most dramatic. I said most significant.

I say this because it affected everything, and because it revealed so much from the digital disc.

Last week I received an email from an AG member, who had run across one of my old posts on the TL2, shortly after he had hooked up his new Transport. Want to chime in Kolledog?

For the price of a good quality transport,you can get into a complete CD player with digital outs.This might also allow for comparison of its' analog outs, to the trans/dacs' output when auditioning a digital cable.

If the DAC is excellent at jitter rejection then it won't make a difference (one jitter immune input versus another should sound the same as it is all just bits). If the DAC is less than perfect at jitter rejection then it could matter. So your results will vary depending on how well the downstream DAC can handle whatever jitter is being thrown at it.