Differences between cd transports?

tweak1-- so what was better, the Oppo 105 via coax, or the Marantz HDCD1 via coax?  I'm curious because I use my Oppo 105 via XLR's to a Hegel H360 Integrated to play SACD's and HDCD's and was thinking about trying the coax digital output to compare the sound quality.  Perhaps the Hegel DAC is better than the Oppo's, but not sure.

@dobnbav Of course that a DAC can improve things coming out of a transport in one simple way: memory buffer can entirely eliminate jitter and correct few other aspects of the signal. It cannot make up for missing data, but generally that's not the problem. And whether coax or optical is better once again entirely depends on the DAC. I'm fairly positive that a $500 Chord Mojo is not going to sound any different with either transport due to its immunity to jitter and/or signal quality (squareness of the incoming wave).

I believe @dobnbav is talking about much more than controlling jitter. As stated, the power supply, laser, etc. creates a sonic signature of the component. A poor design or low quality parts will pass this signature to the next component.

As long as data from CD is bit perfect the only thing that affects the sound is jitter.  Jitter, having many different forms (correlated, uncorrelated etc.), can produce many sound signatures.  D/A converter word clock's time variation (jitter) converts into many additional (very low level) frequencies on the analog side - basically a noise. Jitter can be produced by transport, by connecting cable or by the DAC itself.  DACs have ability to suppress jitter and all of them do, either by buffering combined with PLL or by Asynchronous Rate Converter (resampling data to D/A convert with new stable clock).

fred, the Oppo by a wide margin (like a torquie V8 it has a lot moe low end drive) versus a sweet turbo 4 cylinder. Keep i mind my 105 has a upgraded LPM (easy to install bought from ebay) PLUS the incoming wire rhodium IEC this makes a big difference too, but the toslink was hamstringing it.

According to Oppo tech the 105 cannot output SACD, unless your dac has I2Bus input. If not, SACD has to be played via the 105s direct outs to the amp using the variable volume control

hth.