bear in mind that the transport has an ENORMOUS influence on the sound, and you will not get the full potential out of a good DAC.
I have to disagree with this. Charles Altmann insists that his DAC with JISCO circuitry can be used with any cheap transport connected by toslink and will sound as good as an expensive transport. I didn't believe this until I actually bought one of these DAC's and after hooking it up to my very crappy Samsung DVD player discovered that it bested my Naim CDS-3 by a sizable margin. Hearing is believing.