new updates in transports or are they obsolete ?

Interesting comments by Mikesinger. I recently bought a small Yamaha hard drive type unit because I too would like to relieve some of the clutter caused by my CD collection. I'm about to start putting most of my choral CDs (many of which I listen to when learning a piece of music I'm singing and thus don't care too much about sonics) and a number of the ones I listen to less often into the hard drive so I can regain some space. I am not yet giving up my Forsell transport, though, because that is the one transport I've used with enough of a sonic signature that makes the music more engaging to me. I'm very curious, once I've stored a bunch of the CDs, to hear the differences between playback from the hard drive through my DAC vs. playback through the Forsell. The Forsell was designed to sound more like analog playback--it will be an interesting comparison. And Mikesinger is thinking as I am, I'm interested in hearing whether a CD stored in the hard drive via the Forsell transport vs. the unit's own transport mechanism sounds different, both from each other and from direct playing through the Forsell.

Kenn 39, I agree with your thinking in theory; I have no idea how Peter Forsell did it, and it certainly doesn't make any sense to me as to how it could happen either, but his transport consistently has had more of the analog-like "bloom" with individual images in the soundstage and a much wider and deeper overall soundstage than other transports I have tried in my system, particularly in its first version (when I had it upgraded to Mk. IV, it gained a little more focus, though not enough to make it sound like a Levinson or Wadia); in addition, I could always play it louder (something you can always do with analog) than other transports I tried, as the digital edge you sometimes get when listening at higher volumes is not there. I am not an engineer, so I can't explain how it was done, but it is noticeable. I do know he used particularly good parts in the building of the unit, hand-chosen for the sonic signature he wanted to achieve, that likely is the main part of the explanation. I'll also note that this transport is particularly affected by isolation devices, which shouldn't in my mind make a big difference in ones and zeros either but does.

Audioengr: I really am computer illiterate, so I only have a basic idea how this works. You had said in an earlier post that the hard drive would capture the transport's delicate "signature", I had assumed that meant that if I used the Forsell as the transport to transfer the digital data to the Yamaha, it might have a different signature than if I use the Yamaha's own built-in transport to transfer the data from the disc. If not, that's fine with me, one less variable to check in my comparison. Did I misread your previous post?