The DAC will make the most difference. In my experience.
With a caveat…you must use a decent CDT…something like the units I mentioned above. Don’t waste money on a good dac if you plan to drive it with a $99 universal player from early 2000s. Just like anything else in this hobby, you can get by but to realize a full potential of any given component the rest of your system must be on the level.
If the DAC is the same, how different do CD transports sound?
One interesting topic of discussion here is how audible the differences are between CD players when they are used as transports only — or when they are only transports to begin with.
In other words, in a comparison which keeps the DAC the same, how much difference can be heard between CD transports?
This recent video by Harley Lovegrove of Pearl Acoustics provides one test of this question. It may not be the ultimate test, but he does describe the experimental conditions and informations about the qualifications of the listeners.
He comes to the main conclusion here: https://youtu.be/TAOLGsS27R0?t=1079
The whole video is worth watching, I think.
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I posted this on another thread : Transports are not all the same SQ wise and will either hold back or release the potential of the DAC.
I'll further add, it's not about bling , expectation bias, status ranking, and the rest of the commentary. It's about the resulting SQ. Try them firsthand and decide for yourself .
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When I compared my Sony HAP-Z1ES streamer to my MBL 1621A transport, I could not distinguish a difference when they were running through the same DAC, an MBL 1611F. The rest of the chain was an MBL 6010D pre-amp, MBL 9007 monoblock amps, and MBL 111E speakers. I played the same song through both simultaneously and switched back and forth between them. They sounded identical to me. I sent the output to my headphone amp as well and kept playing music and switching between sources on the fly. Again, I wasn't able to detect a difference. This was my experience: others may have different experiences. But in my system, my $2,000 streamer equaled my $20,000 transport. |
I liked this video and the comparison. The players were level matched using a voltmeter and the listening panel seemed to be skilled. These and other details show that there was some thought and care that went into this experiment.
The conclusion drawn about all the transports playing through the same DAC isn’t surprising, just common sense.
Is a transport + DAC equivalent to streaming? Pretty much. Either way, the digital data is being transmitted from point A to point B in a real-time fashion. |
@yage Thanks for watching and commenting thoughtfully. I am curious whether Mr. Lovegrove feels satisfied that a sufficiently high quality of transport (or player used as a transport) was represented in this listening trial. He went to a lot of trouble to do this experiment -- did he miss a chance to use the kinds of units people here are convinced make a difference? (In fairness, I am not sure if any here have done the kind of controlled listening test that Lovegrove did.) |
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