Silly Question...does a transport have a "sound" ?

Danlib, if you hear differences with different transports then one or all of them are bad transports. The bits on the CD are precise (most of the time), and the transport's job is to read and stream them accurately. If they do, all will sound the same. If not, then one or all are introducing random errors into the stream which cannot produce a predicatable audible change. The DAC decides what to do with the erroneous information and produces the sound. There are some common effects with streams that are specifically faster or slower than 44.1 khz, but really, why in the world would this be desirable when the music was encoded with precision at the specified frequency?

When you find several transports that sound the same on your DAC, its likely that they're good transports and are producing accurate streams. Hearing differences only indicates that problems exist. The same argument applies to cables, but that's another discussion.

Metralla - Thanks for the reference - it’s a very good read. I already know about many of the issues involved with extracting information off of a CD, and have in fact chosen to jettison my transport entirely in lieu of a PC based system with music ripped using the software described in the article. There are other issues involved with this type of system, but that's fodder for a different discussion.

The point of a transport having a signature is still at the heart of this discussion. Regardless of how well a transport reads the information from a CD, any jitter produced will represent incorrect data to the DAC, which is responsible for creating the sound as best it can with the information it gets. Different DACs can respond differently in this regard and will likely sound different in each case. When one purchases a high-end transport, the only factor in the decision should be how well it will be able to read and transmit the information on the CD. Should two high-end transports produce different streams with the same CD? They can, but I would argue they shouldn't if they can provide the necessary technology to ensure a correct read. If one compares the results from multiple transports and finds that a set of them sound the same using the same disk and DAC, I’d argue that there's a good chance that those units are reading the disk information correctly (at least within the bounds that the listener cannot perceive any differences). Multiple transports that produce audible differences are clearly not reading or propagating the exact same information to the DAC, in which case I'd conclude that most (or all) of them are producing incorrect results and are not what I would consider ‘good’ transports.

While its clear that Sony and Philips made some poor choices when they finalized the Redbook format, the knowledge of what can be done to get the information from the disk is at least understood to some degree, and its certainly incumbent on the transport manufacturers to utilize what they know to produce the best possible device. When one pays large sums for just this purpose, I'd hope that they'd get what they paid for.

Anyway, folks hear many variations in their audio systems that can be attributable to a number of factors. However, when it comes to transports, the goal should be for all of them to read the disks accurately in spite of the mechanical limitations, and for the variations to be insignificant sonically. This was the point of my previous post.