Transport for Audio Note gear

All transports in this price range will have high jitter, on the order of 1 nsec. The only thing that matters in a transport is jitter and your AN DAC will be very sensitive to it because they use older S/PDIF receiver chips and typically do not resample or upsample the S/PDIF coax input stream. Here is an example of what kind of transport jitter you will get in this price-range:

https://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=154408.0

This much jitter will smear the venu echoes, create halos around the instruments and generally defocus everything that has high frequencies. The result is also less impact, slam, dynamics.

The smart thing is to add a reclocker between the transport and DAC that delivers really low jitter. The Synchro-Mesh is such a device. 7psec of directly measured jitter at the end of a good 4 foot coax cable. A good coax cable is needed when you have jitter this low going to the DAC. You want a cable that does not add anything to the jitter. My Standard or Reference BNC cables with RCA adapters meet these requirements. No RCA terminated coax cable will meet these requirements. Cables shorter than 1.25m will not meet these requirements. Here are some cable jitter measurements, so you can see the difference between no cable and varous cables:

https://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=154425.0

The Synchro-Mesh is an inexpensive way to get the performance of a megabux transport. I have to see any transport match it’s 7psec of jitter at the end of the coax.

Steve N.

Empirical Audio