I did not do any comparison directly. As said, I know the sound from my system clearly as I put a lot of times for my analog system. Having four arms in my system, few phonostages, and coming to a dozen of cartridges allow me to know what individual of these can do. I tried different transport with the MSB Platinum DAC and I know they sounded quite differently even with the top rate of power supplies. I did not give any further in depth analysis to it, it could be my existing cable compatibility issue, the quality of the Optical Pick Up head, or the build in topology of the software, or the build of the hardware. Not very sure, and this is what I mean I found always contrary to most of the goners' feedback that digital playback is easier to deal with as compare to Lp playback which is so troublesome for all the tweaking and matching. If you mean just loading CD into the player, than I would tend to agree that it is easier. But to me the challange is how to get the sound from the digital playback to becoming better and listenable in view of things that are intangible within the system. My personal experience is that more money needs to be spent for digital playback as compare to analog system, as the money you need to spend for the conditioner, power cord, mechanical devices etc. is so much more than the player/DAC itself. This is just my personal experience and it may not speak for the rest.