I recently upgraded from a Marantz SA11 to an Ayre C5Mp , both being used as transport's only , both were run into a Levinson DAC . The Ayre is leaps and bounds a better sounding transport . That being said , I have always felt the transport is at least as important as the DAC . Ernie Fisher used to preach the importance of the transport . So to answer your question , " are fine transports almost pointless now ? " yes , if you don't appreciate good sound .
how can a cheap cd drive equal a fine transport?
Once a "perfect" file is on a HD, I grasp why playback may be better than reading data from a drive in real-time. But when ripping a cd, the digital data stream is read by a cd drive, i.e, a flimsy, cheap transport. The best transports produce a data stream with less error, or jitter. Large amounts of error correction are audible, so presumably, the less error correction applied, the better. So at the point where the cd is read by a drive, before applying error correction, before it even reaches a HD (or the prior optimal solution, a Genesis Digital Lens), how can a cheap computer drive produce a data stream comparable to a good transport? How can programs which try it 64 times, or whatever, produce a better result? Aren't they just using error correction (or checksum algorthms to determine which attempt got the best result, out of many error-laden reads) compensate for high initial error rates? Are fine transports almost pointless, now?