How does a Transport effect sound?

@audioengr If I understand you correctly, you are saying that putting the Synchro-Mesh between any transport and DAC, will essentially turn the SQ of the transport (not the DAC) into something roughly equivalent to dCS, MBL, Esoteric, MBL. Is that accurate? (I'm assuming here you are talking about SQ only and not build quality.) I'm asking because I'm in the market for a transport. 

audioengr
Geoffkait: “Background scattered light has not been addressed by any manufacturers, at least not to any great extent. So there’s that. And magnetism and static electricity are still problems, there’s that, too. I suspect maybe “jitter” isn’t the do-all end-all for various problems involved with CD playback. There’s also the nagging question of why they can’t make the clear layer in CDs a little more transparent.”

All of these problems are addressed by two current solutions:

1) reclock the S/PDIF output from the transport

2) design a transport using a CDROM and a computer motherboard and memory. Buffer in memory and spool it out over S/PDIF

And JITTER is the THE ONLY issue with the S/PDIF output on a transport, period!

I am a EE that has designed digital systems for 42 years and have designed dozens of digital audio interfaces including S/PDIF, AES/EBU, I2S, differential I2S, 6 generations of USB, Ethernet. I know what I'm talking about.

There are obviously other issues that come up if you use the D/A inside the player and the analog outputs.

Steve N.

Empirical Audio


>>>>Obviously, I’m talking about CD players and transports. Furthermore the scattered laser light issue is not (rpt not) a jitter (timing) issue. So jitter is not the only issue (for the majority of audiophiles).

For a lot of insight into errors inherent in reading CD optical disks, try ripping a CD with DBpoweramp and learn.

It will give you actual metrics using reference database web service that gets updated and enhanced over time  as new user rips occur.   It provides metrics on how accurate the rip is compared to the current reference maintained in the database.     No need to guess.   More popular CDs can have up to 200 rips for reference available during ripping in the database.  Very cool!

Good quality CDs tend to rip fast and clean using my laptop’s disk reader. I’d estimate 60-70% of the time. More errors encountered and longer ripping time needed for rereads maybe 20-25% of the time with visually good quality disks. . Damaged CDs with visible scratches or flaws will almost always require multiple rereads to assure acuracy and take longer.

If you turn the accurate rip feature off, rips happen faster and you will be told how many errors occur per track.

The good news is that in most cases you will have to listen very hard on a really good system to hear most errors that do result with accurate rip off. I know of one CD out of several thousand I have ripped where the errors in the form of dropouts are clearly heard every time streamed.

Is there any CD transport that can do all that in real time as required? Also provide quality metrics as reading? I do not know of one. Most people would rather not know and never will need to I suppose.

That’s why I never play CDs anymore. I rip them to my library correctly once then stream from there.