Minimalist PMC AML:1 based setup - opinions needed

Just wanted to chime in on my experience with the SB vs Transporter

Technology for digital source is getting extremely good and differences are becoming vanishingly small. Design engineers can only spend so much on power supplies and higher quality components. Often more expensive products just have better features and are built beautifully and expensively packaged - of course they eek out a small degree of less jitter and better channel separation etc. - but differences are often small. What you report is not all that surprising although most people are naturally predisposed to rate the beautifully packaged item as sounding much better.

FWIW - I think the Transporter looks way cool! The build quality and features are awesome. It is worth if for that great look alone as well as the comfort that it is made from very high quality components. May be with headphones you can hear a slight difference?

Can the Transporter be connected directly to a power amp or active speakers?

yes it can.

For the money, if it is pure "technical" quality you are after then Benchmark DAC1 is hard to beat and has gained wide respect as an excellent DAC (jitter immune), a great preamp (but NO remote - so caveman design for modern times) and it comes with a world class headphone amp to boot. So no need for a preamp if you can handle the inconvenience of manual volume control or can accept the poorer performance of "digital volume control".

What sounds subjectively better will be a matter of personal taste - so I can't really help there. Benchamark has a tightly focussed soundstage that is generally narrower than anything else (great image between the speakers but less soundstage width/size overall unless it happens to be on the recording - if you like all your music to sound "big" then DAC1 is not for you)

There is no such thing as a jitter imune dac its complete sales BS, also there are several diffrent kinds of jitter

While I agree that nothing will be completely jitter free, however, in the case of the DAC1, the sales BS is backed up by measurements using audio precision equipment - while not perfect (what is?) the measurements demonstrate what most would call excellent "immunity to jitter".

When comparing good DAC's as you have could it be possible you are hearing small differences between them in the analog output circuitry (op amps) and low pass filter design rather than differences due to jitter?

TDa2000,

I agree with you about jitter. I also agree with you about Linn "house" sound. You obviously like this sound a lot. Linn are extremely successful.

The transporter is a very good example why you shouldet rely to much on measurments.

For you and many others yes. However, some do like a purely accurate sound - as clinical as it may be (depending on the recording)