Why upgrade transport???

Mitch- I don't know how attached you are to the rest of your gear or even what it is worth, but if you could sell it all and get an audio aero capitole mk I or mk II, I think you would be very pleased. Run it direct to the amp and it will blow you away, not to mention with less cableing. Long ago a very wise audiophile told me the simplier a system is typically the better it will sound(to me it only makes sense, less things to screw up) look at vinyl why is it better? because it is MUCH simpler. This is just my opinion though YMMV. ~Tim

Tim,
I've seen data 2's for about 500 bones all over lately. I've heard really good things of them, evan comparisans to levinsons, I bought one and was shocked.
The basis for this is IF you have all you clocking and jitter dealt with in the sophistication you already have, may be only upgrading the stability of the transport itself, (or to some degree) which makes a big difference. The data is a big, solid monster. Like tireguy says, simpler is better I have found, and the data has good jitter control, but you may discover your stuff is quite good too.
Then, it seems to me the only way to upgrade, is to get a good transport with 24/96 capability anyway, which leaves you having to sell anyway, and that only leaves one more conponent to sell.

The Pioneer PD65 is a very good transport and it was used by Wadia and Theta. If you are planning to buy a used transport, check with the manufacturer to see if they still have spare transport parts. Philips stopped making the transport that's used in the Sonic Frontiers SFT1 a couple of years ago.

A transport does not send out "1's and 0's" -- what it does is take the digital information off a CD and convert it into an electrical signal that is REPRESENTATIVE of the digital stream of "1's and 0's". This signal is then routed to the DAC in a manner just like any other audio electrical signal.

Therefore, the quality of the transport is dependent on the same thing as other components, namely the quality of the power supply, filtering caps, voltage regulators, signal path resistors, caps etc. And of course, the higher the design and build quality, the more expensive.

Yes, the transport affects sound quality and upgrading a transport can have more than a subjective benefit. I also agree it is the most important component of a digital front end.

The last thing I would spend a lot of money on right now is an expensive transport, unless the money's not that big a deal to you. If you really feel like your transport is limiting your playback potential, I'd go with a new all-in-one player. But we're not far from a new way of serving up digital music (analog, of course, is a completely different story) - the fact that getting the information from the transport to the DAC is so problematic is an after-effect of the outdated technology used for CD's. Some sort of memory-based storage system isn't far off - imagine a CD player that reads the whole CD into RAM before clocking it into the DACs. If you can copy whole CDs error free, you could design a player to read the whole thing into RAM error free. 700MB of RAM isn't that expensive anymore, so there isn't a financial barrier to making a mid-to-high end player like this. Or you'll have a music server far, far away from your system, but connected via ethernet and stream your music collection error free. A company like Tact with their RCS devices can become a software company, at least for this product line. There's no technical reason why this functionality should cost more than a copy of Excel in the future. -Kirk