What is the benefit of a good transport?

It's really just zeroes and ones, right? Better transports provide more stable platforms and better read capability. A very knowledgable friend with an EE degree who competently builds his own tube gear was not a believer of this until I sold him my modified CEC 2000 transport which is the most analogue he's ever heard. He was shocked at the difference. Much smoother and detailed than anything he had owned, so it is real.

I don't know exactly why transports sound different, but they do! Alright, alright, it's about 0's and 1's but... I think it's about jitter, don't you think? So in theory the transport with the less jitter is the superior one, I suppose... Have you heard a good sounding jitter troubled transport? In that case, just forget my preassumptions, I'm not a digital guru.

Chris

Jitter is the biggie. In non technical terms, it is 0's and 1's, but if the timing of their arrival to the DAC is off or not even or smooth, etc, then the DAC is going to have to work extra hard to turn those messy numbers into music. And down goes the sound quality.

So if it is about jitter is that something that new technology has improved upon or is an old (say early 90s), high quality transport more or less as good as any newer transport?

It is my understanding that jitter can be dealt with at the transport level, the DAC level or both for that matter. A signal is passed, along with the ones and zeros, to the DAC and if the DAC is designed to reclock the signal, jitter is dealt with.