DAC - How much difference does the transport make?

dear downwardsloping,

the AS mods are really really worthwhile for the Dax, but I could not say for other DACs.

The Sony CDP-XA5ES is a solid piece of CDP, and David Heaton of AS knows its potential.

I would suggest that you drop a line to David. He is a knowledgeable 'gent' in that he will give good and honest advice.

I note that he was selling off older Dax Decade, should you be interested, and then you get the Ncode option.

 

having done a back to back test with an arcam alpha transport, dpa transport and my then squeezebox 1. i definately say that a/s dac's are not immune to jitter.
the improvement in sound when i moved from sb1 to sb2 (which had far less jitter when using flacs thanks to some early soft/hardware problems with the sb1) was not subtle.
the a/s dac's have 2 locking mechanisms one for jittery sources and a better quality one for those with jitter under a certain threshold.
if you're looking for a cheap solution then i can't think of much that will touch an a/s decade fed by a squeezebox 2 (i'm assuming you have a pc) even if you need more hdd space a 400gb drive is only about 80 quid nowadays. put it through a semi decent power amp and whatever speakers you like and you're sorted.
yes ripping cd's can be a pain but once it's done it's done.

 

SM, if the apple sounded worse then you can blame it on the spdif convertor or something in your sound settings on the apple. it 'should' be noticably better.