How important are transports?

If the digital signal is not retrieved from the CD accurately, the DAC will not have a quality product from which to work. People have said over the last 20 years that digital is digital, so it doesn't matter what you use to get the one's and zero's from the disc, but my contention is that this is false. Everything plays a part in the sound.

I have been trying to decide on a transport for my system and have auditioned several transports in my system recently. I currently have a CAL Delta, a Sony DVP S7000, a CEC TL5100Z, and a Vecteur D2. Each of these units sounds a little different in my system (running through a Scott Nixon TubeDac, a Bottlehead Foreplay preamp and a pair of 2A3 amps).

In some cases, the differences are very slight, but noticeable to me. So, if your system is capable, you may hear differences also.

JD

Lots of stuff on this in the forums, including very recently.

The quality of transport is the most important part of digital playback. I've tried various combinations of transports and DACs and every single time transports made much bigger difference. If you are investing in digital separates, spend the money on a good transport first, you won't regter it.
Also, if you are mainly interested in CD, get a stand alone redbook transport. Universal players never achieve the same quality in CD as CD only transports do.You can get a great used CD transport for very little money these days.......

Probably depends on the specific innards of the DAC you are using. Per a musical fidelity dac review in stereophile, that company's designer (Antony Michalson or something like that)says they reclock the bit stream in the DAC, and so which particular transport or cd player with digital output you use doesn't make diddly for difference.
A DAC which does not reclock might be much more sensitive to variations in timing from a less than perfect signal source.
There are a lot of great used cd players with digital outputs, my suspicion is that a great cd player probably does not have poor bitstream timing and tends to be priced a lot more competitively than a transport. Other thing is it is handy to be able to swap back and forth between the cd player output and the dac output when evaluating your system or when your dac is on the fritz.