Big problem / bottleneck in my chain

Well. The Aurender is probably as good a source or better than the Moon. I would expect it to perform at least as good as the CD transport... possibly better. I own a Aurrender N150 for my headphone system.  

In my main system, I cannot tell the difference between a CD, Stored files, and steaming of exactly the same mastering. That is a good thing, and was the goal. My systems are shown under my ID.. but an Aurender W20SE, and all Audio Research Reference components. There is definitely no good reason the transport should sound better. A transport is a mechanical transport and a streamer combined as you are using it). But it is a little surprising (maybe good) that it doesn’t sound slightly different. Moon (I’ve owned some high tier CD/DAC) is pretty dry and detailed. I would expect the Aurender to be very slightly warmer and more natural.

This does not answer all your questions, however. It is strange that you are not hearing differences between DACs as you switch things around. DACs tend to sound different. Your speakers and amp are pretty sensitive... hmmm.

Bottleneck ---> room (most probably), ears

This afternoon, I did some experiments:

 

plug the 260d as a cd player straight to the preamp using its internal dac

plug the 260d as a transport to the TT2 (not using the mscaler) using the shunyata alpha bnc spdif

plug the 260d as a transport to the internal dac of the mcintosh c2700 using a cheap spdif cable (internal dac is a da2)

i couldn’t hear any difference or nuances between the 3. If there was then I could hardly perceive maybe a little subtile more air using the TT2…but not that obvious.

Room : I have treated the room with diffusing and absorbing panels.

Ears : I could tell a difference between preamps and amps last year, and can hear my neighbor whispering in his yard

Treating a room to improve resolution is a rather intricate task and not cheap (for treatment that actually works). A couple of diffusers and absorbers (so many different ways they can be designed) made by whomever that’s put up in a decorative fashion doesn’t get rid of room resolution bottlenecks.

Further, spending more on certain types of gear is no guarantee of any breakthrough.... You don’t "get what you paid for" actually, in that sense. It comes down to the technical aptitude of the manufacturer. If you paid him more, it won’t guarantee that he got smarter. Every engineer is born with a certain amount of smarts and he won’t  just get smarter and smarter because you paid him more and more...very simple fact of life.

I won’t name any brands, but, hope that all makes sense. If it doesn’t now, it will someday.

Thank you…. Even if getting out of the topic / questions

I agree with @ghdprentice that it is not necessarily an issue that your CD transport and streamer sound very close to each other, and in fact this could be considered a positive. It is of concern that you cannot hear the difference when other DAC’s are used. 

Ignoring the CD for a second, can you hear a difference when the Aurender uses the Chord DAC vs the DAC in your preamp? A second test I would run is to connect the Aurender to the two different DAC’s via USB, and compare the sound between the DAC’s and to that of the CD. These tests will not necessarily solve your problem, but will confirm if you can hear a difference between the DAC’s, and if the connection method, and/or clocking, might be a factor.

In all cases, I would remove the mscaler to simplify things. 

My take is the Cardas and Mac gear both have rather "darker" playback tendencies and with the chain you have it is not freeing up the signal. Try a different preamp or some other cables. I would say your dac, Coda, and speakers are A-okay. That's my fly-by suggestion.

It's most likely cables or Mac or both.

@zlone I am focusing on that from now on. Only Aurender. Will report in a few days 

As for comments on McIntosh : my c2700 replaced an AR ref3 as it was at least as transparent and providing more depth. It is not voice on the dark side. And for Cardas cables. We are speaking of the high end, they are not dark sounding.

Keep us posted on the results of your tests, I am interested in helping you find a solution. 

To address one part of your post, I recently bought a used Chord Qutest, which I like a lot.  A friend was thinking of selling his MScaler and I considered buying it, but he had a Qutest and now has the Dave, and he said the difference it made with the Qutest was minimal and not worth straining my budget.  He's not even sure he needs it with the Dave.  I'm going to guess that the TT2 might be a similar situation. 

Some reported big changes of TT2 and Dave with the mscaler. But again I guess it depends of people, hears, and the rest of the gears like anything. Definitely maybe more changes with a lower grade dac….

I'd try USB vs SPDIF. What's the delta between clocks in the transport, dac, and mscaler? 

What is your room like?

The room is not very big and open to the floor below.

I realized that I am getting a difference with an esoteric player that I borrowed, not drastic but better.

Meaning Moon and chord are excellent finally ☺️

Next step => Esoteric

No offense intended to you @antmou I'm trying to help you as it seems you have a similar dilemma I experienced. And I remedied it with cabling. IME those Cardas cables are not helping you. They are lower tier or older recipes that are darker sounding. I have had the Cross, Golden Ref, and Reflections (and Clear and Clear Beyond which are not "dark") and can say definitively they are dark. I am offering this because I have spent stupid funds auditioning cables for 3+ years and agonizing over what the brands bring to the table. I like Cardas cables, but in this system those particular cables are not helping your sound. Some of the higher level Cardas brought great pleasure to me but over time I tired of their sound which always tended to be slightly veiled. When I was on this journey my system kept taking leaps up in performance due to cabling upgrades. I did not want to go down this rabbit hole but the time and money was well worth it to allow my components to sing.

You have great gear. I think you can unleash the sound with different cables. Check my TN system page for some of my journey. Today I am smitten with Wywires Diamond or Platinum and have ended my journey (finally). There are others that are also very close to opening up the sound like Snake River. Some of the Synergistic Research cables have great air to them as well.  Lots of great cables out there that can help your system sound.

Happy listening!

 @bugredmachine , I don’t take any offense at all, thank you for your time and piece of advice. I see those cables are $$$ 

So I could either upgrade my cables 1st , then equipments , or vice versa…

Thank you again