How important is the transport when using a DAC?

Hi LearyScott

I had a $30 Memorex DVD player as a transport to a Musiland MD-11 DAC and this combo was very un-involving. When listening to music all I could picture in my head was grey cold steel. I later changed the transport to a Cambridge Audio CD player that had a significantly better build quality and the overall sound improved. YMMV.

What transports are you eyeing?

If you are going to use a dac then a good transport is always going to make a big difference. I've experimented with the concept over twenty years and you need a good transport to hear what your dac and system is truly capable of.

Very much a function of the overall architecture. With reclocking and asynchronous DACs, the difference are definitely a lot smaller then with a traditional synchronous architecture. It is still a bit of a mystery to me why a transport would make any difference if the bits are fed into a buffer and then completely reclocked, but I guess they still do.

We are dealing with "systems" and like all systems, they are only as good as the weakest component. The answer to your question is going to require listening and comparing different components in your system. The effort should give you what you are looking for.

Newbie chip in here: normally when using standalone DAC, I would think people have a pure digital system, with some sort of transport like a computer or squeezebox to feed into the DAC to play the ripped lossless files. Alternative path would be a decent CD player with DAC built in. What the advantage of having a standalone DAC but still use CD player instead of lossless files ?