Please Recommend Transport + DAC for $5K total

In my opinion, the Oppo players do not make a good transport for PCM audio. It uses two low grade clocks (25mhz and 27mhz I think). One is for CPU and the other is for HDMI interface. They are not good crystal clocks and are not even close to the native audio sampling rates. The CPU has to do integer math based on 27mhz to generate the 44.1khz or 48khz or whatever sampling rate output. This is okay, but not as good as a dedicated audio clock.

@auxinput 

Appreciate your opinion. But why would/should that matter if the external DAC is doing the re-clocking? In the case of Yggy

"Yggdrasil accepts up to 5 digital inputs and carefully manages them with our Adapticlock™ clock regeneration system. Adapticlock is the most sophisticated clock management system in the world. It assesses the quality of all inputs, measures their incoming center frequency and jitter, and automatically routes the input to the best clock regeneration system. And, our Gen 5 USB features full galvanic isolation via transformers, self-power for low-noise and latching sections, and high-quality local clocking for both 44.1 and 48k multiples. "

@auxinput

The LKS 004 uses a Crystek CCHD-575 femtoclock on its main board and two Crystek CCHD-957 femtoclocks on the upgraded Amanero USB to I2S board. The results using ripped SACDs sent to the USB from a hard drive through a lap-top are superb, beyond any digital I have ever heard. (I’ve been principally into analog.)

I have been using an Oppo 105 to play CDs through the LKS using spdif. The results have been very good, very clearly better than the 105 by itself. But on the basis of what you write, I’ll try ripping some CDs, send them in through the USB and do some comparisons. Is there a reasonably priced CD player you recommend?

Owning the LKS is a bit of an adventure. But support from users and from the factory has been very good, and the value is impressive.

@gdhal - I have listened to sample rate converters and reclockers. While reclockers will definitely help a bad source, in the end you still end up losing resolution and detail. It’s much better to have the original waveform data clocked properly at the source rather than reclocking a bad jitter source. Take for example an oppo Blu-ray. Listening to PCM audio through HDMI means the data is clocked badly at the source since the audio needs to be spread across multiple HDMI data packets and shared with video data. The HT processor has to try to reclock this properly. In real life, the sound may be okay, but it just doesn’t have the resolution / detail / air / texture. Listening to the same PCM from Oppo using digital coax is just highly superior, and even then this is not clocked as good as a dedicated PCM transport.

@melm - Cambridge CXC for cd transport. There’s one used on audiogon from Canada for $295. Hi-Fi Heaven is selling display models for $399. Crutchfield has them new for $449. Then get a nice DH Labs D-750 coax with BNC on one end (use the BNC input on the LKS). The CXC only has RCA digital coax output.
USB is likely to sound worse than coax spdif, but that’s a guess.

Just a correction the CXC has also optical output but the coax output in general is the best option between the two. Bellow 5k I can recommend the Mcintosh d150 a remarkable DAC ( with the CXC as a transport) it has the latest features, extremely low noise,very good dynamics and transparency .absolutely neutral and natural sound.

I was just saying that the CXC doesn’t have BNC output.