Esoteric P5/D5 Opinions please

Someone corrected me, it should be on a performance/price ratio that this ranking was compiled.

That makes a lot more sense. In any case, the P-05/D-05 is probably going to move a good amount of units for Esoteric as the price tag is significantly more palatable than the P-03/D-03 and in comparison to the X-01D2, it's aesthetically more refined.

The stereo sound survey is a bit odd in that counts "stars" (out of 5 I believe) a component receives from its reviewers then adds up the # of starts total to get an overall score that decides the ranking...the problem is not all the reviewers vote on all the products while all reviewers vote on any product they have reviewed or wish. Thus not comparing like for like as the # of reviewers can end up the deciding the ranking quite easily...and thus the ranking loses much meaning. However, the mag does provide which reviwer ranked which product how many stars so the reader can make his/her own deductions.

I am using P-05 Transport (upsampling frequency Red Book Audio to 176.4kHz) and Weiss Medea DAC (Swiss Made) with dual AES/EBU input. It's clear that P-05 out perform my reference Burmester CD transport 979 ($15,000 USD) in terms of detail retrieval, imaging and when it comes to dynamics.
P-05 Dual outputs digital signal XLR (left + right) lest you suspect that this put the other CD Transport at a disadvantage!

has anyone here tried using a different transport other than esoteric's to connect to the D5 ?
I read that a large part of the p5/d5 excellent performance comes from the D5 converter ?

Also, what would be a better move: buying an xo-3se or a D5 using a cheaper transport ? ex would be something like a nad, cambridge or cec player with digital output ?

tks for inpts