Does the Transport make a significant difference

Actually, I'm not trying to win. Honestly, there must have been something wrong with your preamp to mess up your soundstage to such a degree...as you describe it, you were almost listening in mono. Since you still have the pre you should plug it back in and check out that it is operating correctly before you sell it.

I have no doubt you are hearing improvements and that your new pre delivers the goods. What I'm questioning is, what was wrong with your prior preamp.

Nothing is/was wrong with the preamp. I don't have a "new preamp yet"; I'm currently running the PS Audio PWD through the P5. Prior to receiving the new DAC, I was going from my CD player to the preamp. Now I'm going from my CD player via a digital cable to the DAC and from the DAC to the preamp via RCA cables. I won't say all of the changes are due to the new DAC, because I went from a unbalanced to a balanced cable, added the Wireworld Gold Starlight digital cable and changed speaker cables at the same time. I wished I would have changed one component at a time and maybe I could attribute the improvements to one thing.

As a recording engineer, when mixing from multi-track sources I take particular care on where instruments are placed within the soundstage. Regardless of wire, cable, DAC or any other electronics I could never shift an instrument around from 0 degrees to any other place without using my DAW. For the life of me I can't see how this could happen. Imagine Jimmy Page playing his guitar straight in front of you....and then magically....without any movement of source components his sound magically appears 20 feet to the left. He didn't move....nor did his amp...speaker or for that matter the room he was playing in. You have to move the source itself or change the acoustics of the room to get a shift in source placement.

I'm not trying to be a pendant but something is wrong electronically for that to happen. Again. I would check your cables....if you are using balanced cables maybe your right cable has a short and you have essentially lowered the voltage in that channel...thus shifting your image to the left.

It could be something else for that matter....but you really should look into why this is happening.

Best of luck.

Ray

Ray - he is probably just removing veils, jitter and distortion. When you do this, the imaging becomes less diffuse and things seem to "snap" into focus, appearing to relocate. They have not really moved, just focused.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Should I upgrade from the Perfectwave DAC II to the Directstream or keep the Perfectwave DAC II and upgrade my transport from a NAD 565bee CD player to a PS Audio PerfectWave Transport? I just upgraded my preamp and this will be my last upgrade for a long time. Your suggestions are appreciated!