[HPiper]

I was just curious what, if any, advantages there are to buying a cd transport and an external dac, vs using a good quality cd player and an external dac. What does a stand alone transport do better than a good quality cd player using the players optical or coax outputs going to an external dac. Is this mostly just smoke and mirrors or are there real advantages to a transport?

 

[cjl]

An audiophile-grade transport is much better at emptying your bank account than most CD players are. Aside from that advantage, there's no difference in sound quality. There's also no advantage (in the great majority of cases) to using a CD player's optical or coax to an external DAC, rather than simply using the analog output of the CD player's internal DAC to go straight to your amp.

 

[RazorJack]

Agreed, in terms of sound quality I'd say it shouldn't really matter. I like to use my external dac because of its crossfeed features though.

 

[bigshot]

Even cheap CD players can be audibly transparent. I did an A/B test between a cheap $40 Coby Korean CD player and a $900 Philips. No difference.