new updates in transports or are they obsolete ?

Interesting comments by Mikesinger. I recently bought a small Yamaha hard drive type unit because I too would like to relieve some of the clutter caused by my CD collection. I'm about to start putting most of my choral CDs (many of which I listen to when learning a piece of music I'm singing and thus don't care too much about sonics) and a number of the ones I listen to less often into the hard drive so I can regain some space. I am not yet giving up my Forsell transport, though, because that is the one transport I've used with enough of a sonic signature that makes the music more engaging to me. I'm very curious, once I've stored a bunch of the CDs, to hear the differences between playback from the hard drive through my DAC vs. playback through the Forsell. The Forsell was designed to sound more like analog playback--it will be an interesting comparison. And Mikesinger is thinking as I am, I'm interested in hearing whether a CD stored in the hard drive via the Forsell transport vs. the unit's own transport mechanism sounds different, both from each other and from direct playing through the Forsell.

That will be interesting Rcprince, keep us informed.

Semi - I just leave my laptop on all the time. It has power saving modes for the CPU and screen. Just touch the touch pad and you are up and running playing songs. Much quicker than turning on a CD player and loading a CD, and I dont have to get up from the listening position.

"will hard drive playback capture the transports "delicate" sonic signature"

Absolutely, but with even more clarity.

- will play back on a pc be better coming coming off the hard drive after transferred since there is suppoose to less jitter ?

Playback from the "hard-drive" is actually always from a cache in memory. The data stream from the USB only needs to average the streaming rate. The precise clock is added at the converter. It's in the converter where the low-jitter timing happens. This is where the magic is.

it would appear that a high quality transport with firewire, usb output (or a computer interface /hard drive) would be optimal..

USB or firewire to S/PDIF is a great start. USB or firewire to I2S is even better. Look for my white paper in positive-feedback.com on Computer Audio for more info.

Creek CD50 mk2 uses a computer style transport. It would be interesting to see a review on using the Creek as a transport.