What is purpose of a cd transport?

There are two completely separate parts of digital playback; the reading of the source material and the conversion of that digital data into analog sound. To perfect them both is two separate tasks. Having them together in one box only makes perfection harder to achieve.

If you an expert digital design engineer, what do you know about making a transport? There are a lot of companies that only make the DAC. If you limit yourself to one box players, you are missing a huge part of the market. You are also missing most of the higher end of the market.

Look at turntables. What if the cartridge and phono stage was built perminently onto the turntable? If you wanted to change something you would have to buy a whole new turntable. I don't know any audio person who would consider that an improvement.

That is actually one thing that turns me off to the lower end of the audiophile turntable market. They are all selling plug and play solutions. You have to pay for the cartridge they picked for the turntable. Back in the pre-digital days in the 70s and 80's the cartridge was mostly a separate purchase, even if you were just buying the entry Dual turntable.

Blue Circle just came out with a two box version of their DAC. The very large power supply is in a separate box. So with the transport you have three boxes in total. MSB has had separate power supplies for years (the P1000).

Audio Logic has done the same thing with their DAC in the past (the new MDX version is a one-box DAC)--in fact, their prototype actually had three boxes, one for the DAC circuitry, one for the analog power supply and one for the digital power supply. With my Forsell's air pump, I have four boxes instead of one. My non-audiophile friends roll their eyes a lot. Does it all make a difference? I think so, but in objective terms the difference all of my esoterica makes is probably very little in the grand scheme of playing music, otherwise I could not be moved listening to music on my car radio.

Yeah Rcprince 4 boxes !!!
In the Blue Circle product I mentioned (BC501-OB), the separate power supply while in one box is actually two supplies. There are two umbilical cords between the power supply and the DAC, one the digital supply, the other analog.

That's how the production Audio Logic with the single power supply did it as well. A good design. I sort of miss the separate boxes from the prototype, though, because you could turn off the analog stage (and therefore save tube life) while leaving the digital stage on all the time, which seemed to help it sound better.

Hell, Sugarbrie, my PREAMP is 4 boxes. Where my friends can turn on their receiver with one button and a CD player with another and have music, I have a tuner, a CD transport, a DAC, two preamp power supplies, an active crossover and four amplifiers to turn on to get music (and then I have to wait 6 minutes until the Jadis' auto-muting goes off)! Is it any wonder people view us as "different"?

I love, I love it, Rcprince !!!!

If you listen to vinyl then you have to get the Blue Circle BC27pi phono stage, even if only for the reason it's a two box phono stage !!

Do you have separate mono-block amps ??
6 separate cables for each tri-wire speaker?

Then install dedicated AC power lines for each power cord !!

Sorry, I am getting out of control here...