Reference Transports: An overall perspective

Pardales:Have YOU compared in your system a hard drive against a reference transport: one of these...

Zanden 2000
CEC TL-0X
Metronome Kalista; T2-i Signature; and T2-A
Esoteric P-01; and P-03(?)
EMM Labs CDSD
47Labs PiTracer
Weiss Jason
Accustic Arts Drive 1
Ensemble Dirondo
Wadia 270se

No, I have not used any of those. The transports I have had in my system tested
against the hard-drive is the newer CEC TL-51X (I think I have the model right)
-- it retails for around $1500. I have also had some older model Denon and
Sony CD players that were touted for their excellence as transports (in their day
5-6 years ago). None of them sounded better than the hard drive. None of them
sounded worse either. I am not saying transports are of no use.....but combine a
thoughtfully constructed hard-drive based system (including a good device for
between the computer an DAC) with a high quality DAC, and I think one would
have to spend a lot to get a significant improvement from a conventional
transport.

Hey, I might be wrong about this. But I think hard-drive based music systems
can equal some pretty nice transports.

Pardales, I think you might be surprized how much of a sonic improvement you would hear with a reference level transport compared with a hard-drive.

I'm no engineer so I don't know why a reference transport would perform better then a hard-drive or an average transport, but every time I have gone to a better transport, right now my reference is the new Accustic Arts Drive1-MK2, the sonics get better, not just different, but a true improvement.

Anything's possible Teajay. If I get a chance to demo a really top-flight transport
in my system I certainly will. That said, my hard-drive based music server isn't
going anywhere, no matter what. There is just nothing like having any song or
album in my entire music collection at my fingertips. You should see the way
iTunes 7 allows you to scroll through your music by album cover. Very cool.
Sorry, I know this is off topic for this thread.

If your transport breaks, you repair or get a new one. If your HD goes south, it gets tossed with all you stuff on it or you have to buy an adapter kit to hopefully download available content that's hopefully not corrupted.