Transports and jitter

For the hell of it, I tried using a DVD player that my daughter bought at our local drug store for about $30 into my PSAudio Digital Link III DAC.
I won't say that is sounded as good as my normal transport ( NAD Universal
Player) but it was pretty close.

When I was looking for a transport a year or so ago, I tried many and found all of them to sound different. Some better, some worse, but all made an impact. There was a thread on here awhile ago talking about transports and most all who responded heard a difference.

BTW, I settled on a CEC TL2. One of the best transports I've ever heard. Just wonderful.

Modern dacs seem to be much more immune to jitter, than the ones made 10 or 15 years ago. Better input receiver chips, Asynchronous Sampling Rate Converters (ASRC) - they all contribute to the better sound.

Nowadays, shopping in sub $2000 price range, I would probably spend 70-80% on the DAC (as opposed to 50/50 15 years ago), as that would give you the best bang for the buck. Basicly - any CDP with digital output will do, even a legacy one (DVD players are not that good, as they often fail to provide a bit perfect data at the digital output).

Will a better transport sound better ? Sure. But the same amount of money spent on a better dac would give you even bigger improvement.