Transports not important any longer?


Hello all,

As serious readers of the forum may remember, I just purchased an SFD-MKIII and DSD upsampler. I'm already finding the music to be a major improvement over my old Arcam FMJ. Another league to be honest.

Anyway, I spoke with Chris - the original founder of Sonic Frontiers (now at www.partsconnexion.com) and he said that my DVP-9000ES DVD/SACD should be a perfectly fine transport, and that though AES/EBU would be nice, it really is no longer necessary.

His reasonsing is that the SP/DIF stream is reclocked when it is upsampled in the D2D and then passed on to the DAC via the I2SE cable - and jitter drops to an astoundingly low .4ps. And jitter is not reintroduced from the upsampler to the DAC because of the clock comes to the via the I2SE.

I found this discussion quite interesting, but would love to hear other comments. To be quite honest, the sound coming out of my 9000ES->DSD->SF SFD-MKIII is astounding.

Nonetheless, like all audio-obsessed types, I wonder..

I assume this applies to the Perpetual Technologies DACs, etc.. anything which connects the upsampler to the DAC with a jitter-free connection (firewire, I2SE, and I assume I2S).

Just curious,
Adam
Ag insider logo xs@2xakimball
I'd have to disagree from my experience here. I have a DCS Delius. It's sensitive to transports. Even differnt DVD transports. From the DVD side, I've used a Muse 9 and a Marantz DV-7000. The Muse is much more smooth, the Marantz sharper, more forward, and maybe a touch more detail. The Muse has a BNC out, the Maratz, el cheapo RCA. I've heard the DCS Verdi Transport, and it absolutely smokes the others. It's CD based...
Transports not important? Well, something has to spin and read the disc, but any good CD player, ie ML39/390S have significant jitter control built into the player just as their 36 to 360S series of DACs does. As of now, I still prefer the flexibility of a transport and DAC system, ie the 360S DAC is totally software up-gradeable in the field. Cheers. Craig
A DSD is a product from Assemblage (Sonic Frontiers) which acts as a jitter reducer and an upsampler. It also outputs the bitsream through a cable known as a I2SE - which includes the clock's signal on a seperate wire.

My question about the chord dac is - what sort of digital output does it use?

-Adam
I have a Chord Dac 64 which reclocks 4 seconds of music, and is supposed to be less transport dependant. I have used it with the following, getting better results each time, a Teac V25 VRDS, Linn Ikemi and Teac P-30. For my system, the better the transport the better the sound.
As has been pointed out before, Theta, the originators of separate transports/DAC's for CD, no longer manufacture a CD-based transport - their current models all utilize DVD-based mechanisms, and they feel that these are better even for Redbook CD playback. I don't know if I would go so far as to say that transports aren't important any longer, though. I don't have a high bit-rate, upsampling, or DVD transport-based digital playback system, but I have heard too many differences among transports, even with a reclocking jitter-reduction device in the chain, to believe that the issue has become irrelevent without some sort of comparative proof.
I am not a techie; but my basic understanding and one possible simple explanation is: a DVD disc generally needs a more stable platform than a simple music CD; and the DVD laser has to be able to read more complex compressed data than a CD player. Therefore, DVD players are pretty stable and make decent transports, even the cheaper ones.