Today's Transport War: Significant Differences?

Very good point Ehart -- clearly a conversation about this topic in the cost-no-object realm would be different than in the budget and mid-price levels.

A few of the organizing issues seem, to me, to be:

1. The "rip" or how data is read

2. The quality of bits: are all bits equal?

3. And the whole USB/SPDIF/I2S thing.

There are probably other organizing characteristics that are important, this just reflects where I am in my understanding.

For me the sonic differences have been largely insignificant compared to the difference in convenience of having an entire library of music at my fingertips to mix and match as I choose. I find I do more listening this way rather than having to get up and change the disc every time I want a change. Call me lazy, but I'd rather listen futz around with my software and hardware.

I'm not sure if what you (this thread) are referring to is the one-box HD solutions, as Tvad mentions, and or PC-based audio as I'm using.

Let me go a bit more into how I view the differences as it may be revealing to those who choose to be more discriminating about these details. I've found that when you get beyond a certain threshold of investment, that the gains you get for dollars invested become very rapidly diminishing. Yes, I can hear the differences between my friend's $7K DAC and my outdated NOS DAC which can be purchased for $500-600 on the used market. But those differences are pretty small, IMO, compared to the HUGE difference in price. If you have the money, and want to invest it that way, have at it. I'd personally rather invest in more music. If I had invested additional money in small gains in hardware I think I'd end up feeling it was a poor investment for the gains got, but then everyone has their own threshold, and their own standards. The few times I've done side-by-side comparisons going into the same DAC, the differences between transport and PC/HD audio were not significant to me, nor were they consistent enough to pick out one specific, consistent fault going one way or the other. I would not put my system up there in the realms of great high-end reference systems, rather a modest entusiast's system, judged by pretty discriminating ears. Take it for what it's cost you to read this and the fact that you likely don't know me from Adam.

Marco

My reading of the POV of both Empirical and APL is that their preferences are independent of price, or nearly so. Empirical believe that hard-disk systems give us an opportunity to achieve better sound (by reducing jitter to practically nothing) than we can ever get from a transport spinning a disk. APL are vague on the specifics but seem to feel that the "environment" of a computer is far too polluting to yield seriously good sound. Steve says there's only jitter, nothing else to be concerned with. Alex had not yet weighed in on that. I respect and admire them both and hope I have not misstated their positions. Great stuff!

Steve Nugent of Empirical also says the best to be had is I2S. The Northstar transport with its' I2S output tweaked into a DAC with I2S input is the way to go, according to Steve. He says I2S properly implemented is "magic".