Minimalist PMC AML:1 based setup - opinions needed

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

yes it can.

Well i have had 2 transporters one heavily modded and one stock,i also had benchmark dac 1 and a stello dac here.
I then got the oppotunity borrowimg home the Linn sneaky DS ( under majik ds) and to my utter suprise it completly wipped the floor with the stock transporter, compared to the modded one it was closer but the linn had one major strong point and that was it puts weight to the music, not just more basss but getting weight og the music right, it was also more transperant and simply worlds more musical and tunefull

I now have the majik ds and its simply no comparison to the transporter .

I curious to if the gentelmens above have actually compared the two.

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

I have a fairly decent system, B&W 703's connected to a McIntosh MA6900. My music collection is encoded in the lossless FLAC format.

I bought a Transporter at a good price to replace my SB3. To my ears after countless A/B comparison I could not hear a difference between the two. I had to keep the Transporter because the sale was final but if the situation was different I would have kept the SB and looked at something else.

Yes the Transporter is more feature packed but to my ears I could hear no sound/music improvement.

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?

I would go for the benchmark dac usb with inbuilt pre amp.
I use dac 1 usb myself. I would not suggest you buy anything more expenisive with these speakers as it works great with them. I has max output at 0.7 volts in. That the dac 1 supply. I would buy the pre amp version though.