A "bit" of information

C L E A N U P ...Aisle Five!

The party line from Musical Fidelity (per a dac review in stereophile) is that all transports are the same if your DAC reclocks the bitstream.
My belief is that all digital cables also sound the same if your DAC reclocks (and very likely even if it does not).
Without reclocking there may be merit to Jax2's perspective.
I think audiophiles are sometimes encouraged to lose sight of the fact that bit rate via redbook cd is ridiculously slow compared to modern digital devices, and potential problems inherent to rapid data transfer over long distances are not an issue with a painfully slow cd and a 2 meter digital cable.

The power supply design, common-mode noise, EMI/RF, pulse aberration,quailty of the parts/design of the digital output circut, vibration control and the power cord all can effect on the sound quality?

my marantz 5 disc cd changer sounds VERY different(like crap to be exact) from my dvd player when both used as transports with my Bel Canto DAC2, with Philips $65.00 dvd player being a clear winner. And WireWorld Super Nova 3+ glass toslink sounds way better than the $25 Monster coax when fed into the dac from same dvd player, and I am not the only one to confirm this in my own system, just for those who beleive all digital cables sound the same. go figure.....

Pondering your question got me thinking about optics, like the ones in cameras. Precision optics render sharp images. Dull optics produce errors, particularly at the edges. While maybe irrelevant to CD transports, the precision concept by itself may not be. The transport conveys electrical or optical representations of the ones and zeros, not the numbers themselves. Because the transport performs a translation of the pits and lands embedded in a CD, how well it achieves this feat becomes important. From the responses you can see that not all transports are created equal.

But more to your point, and processing considerations aside, in any piece of audio gear the quality of the parts used, their stability over time, the quality of assembly and the rejection of outside influences like vibration and radio interference, along with cosmetics, play a role in decision making too.