What is purpose of a cd transport?

Crudo20,

You are correct - transport wow and flutter do not matter. It can run at any speed as long as it is fast enough to ensure the digital buffer does not run out. Just as you will not run out of hot water if your boiler/heater tops up the hot water quickly enough.

As for a discman digital out....yes it should be as good as the best...after all it is digital and that is the beauty of digital...digital preserves the original data perfectly.

A caveat, this is provided the DAC conversion is using its own digital ref clock to clock out the buffered bits and not slave to the clock signal from the discman....the discman clock might be less robust than a high quality DAC. A variable clock signal gives jitter and therefore distortion in some rare cases (badly designed equipment)

See this link for a good overview

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~erick205/Papers/paper.html#jitter

Does the apple airport express provide a quick enough & accurate digital signal for DAC purposes?

Thanks Shadorne. It's refreshiing to read such interesting posts especially your link. I get tired of reading repackaged marketing goop masquerading as fact. - Jim

Does the apple airport express provide a quick enough & accurate digital signal for DAC purposes?

In my system, it certainly sounds like it does.

For a published, numbers-based opinion, go to Stereophile's website and search on Airport Express for a 2005 John Atkinson commentary. He says the AX output is bit-by-bit identical to an original WAV file. (Note that this also means Apple Lossless compression is bit-perfect, since iTunes streams everything to AX in AL compressed format.)

Crudo20,

I have no doubt that the digital output from the Airport Express will be perfectly faithful to the digital data that it receives from a PC. The analog output, however, is unlikely to be as top notch as you might get with an expensive DAC or CD player, but probably good enough for most needs; like feeding various built in speaker zones in a "smart" home (I use my Airport Express to feed a Russound Amp in my utility/boiler room, which feeds five separate house zones).