Stand alone dac vs built in dac what's the better

Manufacturers and dealers are the ones touting improvements...and even they concede its marginal at best even on the hi end as they have upsampled,oversampled,etc for years...but everyone wants to justify their purchase...even where so called improvements are incremental...last time I checked cd was still 16/44...

A built in DAC is less prone to added jitter, and external DAC can be used with multiple sources.

Audiofreak, shouldn't you have said in your opinion, "A Linn DS unit will simply trash most CD players, I've heard the DS many times at a friends and even brought it home for a try. It wasn't even close to a mid priced CD player, very sterile sounding, in my opinion.
I 'm not sure why a hard drive music server was even brought into this post.

I find that for a lot of systems, synergy is more important than whether the DAC is integrated with the transport or on an external box.

I use a Bel Canto DAC3.5VB MkII (upgraded from a Mk I) along with a Bel Canto CD2. I found that the combo sounds very very good together. Better than when I use another brand CDPro2M transport feeding the same DAC.

Similarly, my Ayon CD5S which is a one box CD transport/DAC and preamp sounds better with its internal transport, vs an external transport.

Both have advantages, it depends on what you looking for.