@lanx0003
I’d like to hear more from users about your transport, DAC, and/or cable components
You asked, so here's mine, which will be vastly different to most in North America!
Because I live in Australia, my house is fed 240-Volts AC (often closer to 250) and I have done nothing with power cables or power conditioning. I use whatever the component manufacturer included.
My digital transport is a Reavon universal disk player, which handles CD, SACD, DVD and Blu-ray up to 4K. The Reavon uses much of the internals of the now discontinued Oppo players, but with far inferior DACs. So I just use it as a transport with two HDMI outputs, one for audio. The HDMI cables are not audiophile grade, but are high-speed with Ethernet which in my opinion is all you need
I mainly feed a Marantz 8802 AV pre-processor which does have really good DAC chip sets from AKM. From there it is balanced van der Hul cables to my Krell power amplifier. Old Naim speaker cables run to my Quad ESL-2905 which are signal input voltage limited to 40-Volts. I splurged on second-hand QED silver plated cables for the KEF Reference 1 speakers for no particular reason except that they can take more input current than the ESLs and I thought I should give them a chance to shine. The subwoofer is a Velodyne DD18 rated at 1.25-kW RMS which I normally feed with a balanced cable. It can be configured with high-pass balanced outputs to feed the power amplifier, which is good for reducing the signal to the Quad ESLs but a pain when switching to the KEF speakers.
The other six speakers are fed through a Perreaux 6160 6-channel power amplifier, unbalanced.
The overall sound quality is so good that I could tell within a few seconds that there was something wrong with the way the Reavon output from SACDs through its internal DACs. Sure enough, it turned out that it reduces Direct Stream Digital to CD-quality Pulse Code Modulation, ie from 2.8 Mbps to 16-bit at 44-kHz. It is fine as a transport, so I have to somewhat agree that the digital source can make a difference, at least to sound quality if not to sound stage!
I have never heard digital without a dark background, and clear instrument separation does not occur with large-scale classical in a concert hall. But with separately miked and mixed pop there can be pin-point artificial precision - try Dire Straits Brothers in Arms on 5-channel SACD or Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon in Dolby Atmos to hear what I mean. Not available on streaming services, as far as I know.
I generally only change things when they no longer work!
