NOS DAC or CDP?

Cleaneduphippy - I'm sorry for sounding condescending. It is fuzzy issue with transport being adequate or not since it is difficult to spend over $5k for the transport or even get the loaner to listen at home. In addition differences might become more obvious only when other system elements improve in future.

Optical has much (about twice) higher jitter than coaxial and since you don't have coaxial output I thought it might be better to get jitter rejecting DAC.

Clio09 suggestion to buy Monarchy DIP is excellent one. It will solve your problem of optical only output since suppression on optical of Monarchy DIP is much higher than on coaxial and ends up with even lower jitter. Read this: http://www.monarchyaudio.com/DIP4.htm

Muralman1 - jitter produces sidebands at very low levels, (around -80dB with average transport) that are still quite audible since not related to root frequency. In music it is just noise in the background. Jitter is formed in D/A conversion and filtering has nothing to do with it. It is possible that you have good transport to start with. It would be very interesting to try this Monarchy DIP on high resolution system like yours. On my system switch from good CDP to Benchmark gave me incredible clarity and transparency. It also revealed deficiencies of my system like harsh sounding tweeters or thin sounding speaker cable.

Shadorne, I fail to see what jitter sounds like. My sound is supremely cohesive, detailed to the minutest signal, and wonderfully analog. OS DACs sound terrible, and I don't care which one. I can demonstrated the difference here, and have, numerous times.

Anyone can put their ear to my ribbons, and hear pure music out of a black background.

By the way, change out those milk toast diodes out of your transport and DAC for some super Shotkeys and bring the live band in. AN folks don't want you to hear great things out of their lower DACs.

I can respect Muralman's opinions because I also felt that way at one time, but again there are benefits to OS designs IMO as well. Here is some interesting reading I have come across over the years (yes, perhaps embellished with some marketing language but I'm going to assume we're wise enough to read between the lines):

Lessloss Slaving (read through a few pages)

Lessloss Jitter (follow the steps under the diagram)

47 Labs NOS

Digital Diversions

All of this really just supports the fact that there is more than one way to do digital right.

My sound is supremely cohesive, detailed to the minutest signal, and wonderfully analog. OS DACs sound terrible, and I don't care which one. I can demonstrated the difference here, and have, numerous times.

Yes, I can see from your virtual system that you have an amazing setup. Well done!

By the way, change out those milk toast diodes out of your transport and DAC for some super Shotkeys and bring the live band in.

Interesting idea.

I can see you are dead against OS DAC's - no problem - I can understand your perspective as the early ones were indeed quite bad and probably no improvement over older DAC's (but that was before clock speeds/accuracy improved - it is always a moving target with time as to which architecture works best)

Clio09 - in April 2009 issue of Stereophile (also on their website) they review Meridian 808.2 CD player. It is upsampling player with different algorithm digital filter. They claim it is the best player they've heard ever (and better be for $16k). That would suggest some deficiencies in traditional digital filtering.