How important is the transport when using a DAC?

Alan, thank you for seconding my comment. But I would question the reference to the transport's output signal as being analog. Both S/PDIF and AES/EBU signals combine clock, data, and other information into a biphase mark encoded signal. The data that is embedded in that signal corresponds to the 1's and 0's which digitally represent the original analog waveform.

See, for example, page 2 of this paper, starting at the middle of the page.

Regards,
-- Al

Is anyone familiar with the Arcam rdac? It looks pretty basic with coax, toslink and usb inputs. Outputs are by way of a single pair of RCAs. It is advertised by Crutchfield as being an improvement over your sound card and it sells for $479 delivered. The Sony DVD player currently being used as a transport is murky sounding at best. Unfortunately Arcam does not make a transport. They decided to make ipod docks instead. It is interesting reading all of the technical information, but does anybody have a recommendation for a transport to be used with the Arcam rdac?

Not important at all for me. But hey, I'm way biased since I ripped my CDs using a Samsung Blu-Ray Disc reader > Mac Mini/Pure Music > Meicord ethernet cable > Apple Time Machine > Squeezebox Touch SP/DIF > Metrum Acoustics DAC >.

Even though my priority media is vinyl I'm finally enjoying a much more relaxed digital presentation by not using my ModWright Truth modded Denon 5900. I tried the DAC after the Player but streaming is clearly better. So in my opinion, you may not doing your DAC justice.

If I were digital only I'd sell all my front end gear and go with the stunning Empirical Audio Overdrive and be done with it.

First, all of you need to understand that there is no perfect "reclocking" system in any DAC. They all have drawbacks and imperfections that make the majority of them still sensitive to jitter. Maybe not as much as a DAC from 15 years ago, but still sensitive.

IMO, a lower jitter transport or reclocker after a transport is ALWAYS a good idea. If you read the reviews enough you will find that the reviewer with the low jitter source concludes that most DACs sound virtually identical when driven from this source, even $1K and $8K DACs. The conclusion is that the jitter of the digital source is actually more important than the DAC. It has actually always been the case.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

In my opinion the analogue stage is more important. I owned two Tandberg CD players. These were top of the line CD players selling in the neighborhood of $2,000 in the late 1980s. These CD players were identical in every way except one player was 14 bit and the other player was 16 bit. I compared these two CD players over and over again. However, I was unable to distinguish a difference between the two CD players.