When using a DAC does the cd player really matter?

get a good or very good dac then either look for a decent transport or use your computer as a transport. imo, the dac makes the biggest difference as long as your transport is good.

Assuming you use an external DAC, the biggest need is for the transport to accurately create a digital stream. Not all transports are created equal. Quality of the physical components, good circuit design, noise free power supply, and the quality of the clock all impact the ability of a transport to generate an accurate, jitter free stream. The more revealing your system, the more it will reveal transport limitations.

This is the essence of why so many people (myself included) are fans of file based transport (Sonos, Slim Devices, Computer based) instead of a disk based one. It is a newer approach, and as such takes some doing to implement well, but dollar to dollar you can get a lot better performance in my opinion.

why is a "file-based transport" system better? Don't you have to use a transport - or worse, a computer cd drive - to read the digital data into the files, wso the file then contains all the same errors? In other words, the file is no better than the transport/cd drive you used in the first place?

IMHO the DAC is much of the sound presentation and much more important that the transport

thanks for the responses guys. my plan is to use a ps audio digital link 3 with the level three mods. from talking to a few people they say that it makes redbook cd sound like sacd. so i was hoping that i could avoid having to buy a "good" cd player. i am currently using a sony dvp-ns900v that was supposed to be modded by tube research labs (trl). but i am having second thoughts about doing that and going instead with the ps audio dac.