HDCD Transport to non HDCD dac

I too like HDCD. To the OP, try a Berkeley DAC with your transport, does the HDCD justice.

Do transports decode HDCD? I think you can feed any transport into a HDCD DAC.

One thing I did find, a transport that dithers its output cannot be decoded by a HDCD DAC. One of my transports (Wadia) always defaults to dithered output and when playing HDCDs my DAC would not recognize HDCD unless I eliminated dither. Took a while to figure out.

As I mentioned my DAC would not recognize an HDCD
signal from my Wadia transport if it was dithered.

When dither was removed the DAC saw HDCD just fine.

Every time the transport was shut down and powered
back up it defaulted to dither which was kind of a pain.

Could the McCormack transport be doing some form of processing to the digital output?