Does transport matter if using external DAC?

A great bunch of answers, a pleasure to learn from.

I've owned four one-box players, two transports and two DACs, and I've used one of the players as a transport. My most recent DAC was a clear step up, first with a player as transport, then with a pure transport once I had sold the player. The final configuration was much the best, I thought. In other words, the transport made a great difference, in speed, articulation and soundstage, in this case.

Digital cables also make a great difference, but if you limit yourself to considering ones and zeros then cables are voodoo too.

If differences can be perceived, but they don't show up on instruments, then we haven't learned what or how to measure yet. Just yesterday I read on Richard Sequerra's site a wonderfully lucid explanation of why and how "inaudible" frequencies, by intermodulation, affect what we hear.

Hi all.....not to go with the crowd, but the crowd is absolutely correct. In my experience, moving to a CEC transport for me changed everything. You have to hear it to believe it. Transports REALLY matter.

In my experience, the transport usually matters MORE than the DAC.

Changing from direct drive to a CEC made belt drive made an overwhelming difference. It was so much that Dan Wright has the transport as we speak for a very serious mod, including installation of a Bybee filter and a Furutech rhodium plated IEC.

Others have addressed the technical side better than I could, so I'll just add my voice to the chorus answering "Yes!", based entirely on my personal home auditioning experience. Though I don't know if I'd go quite as far as Drrdiamond and say the transport is even more important than the DAC, I do think it's as important, and that you cannot get the performance you paid for out of good DAC unless you supply it from an equally good transport. And that this remains true even if you are using a jitter-reduction box in-between - no free rides, sorry to say.