I asked Pioneer, as I was using a TASCAM CD-200 as a transport (it has a £40 CD drive unit), and why their £3,000 Esoteric transport should be any better. Their reply is below.
My reading is that the transport is irrelevant to sound quality, certainly relative to jitter issues in the DAC, and that even jitter from the DAC may be inaudible. I once tested 4 hi-end DACs side by side and could not tell the difference.
Dear Sir/Madam,
Thank you for your email, your enquiry has been registered in our system
under reference number:
Pioneer ticket ref nr: 25xxx
Hello Mr xxx, difference will be the durability of the mechanism and a
reduction of jitter, which in turn helps your DAC achieve a greater audio
conversion accuracy.
To a certain level jitter is not an issue when
extracting data (computer files and the like),
but when a real time DA
conversion is done to the data stream, jitter becomes very important and
can create minute timing issues in the DA conversion.
Whether it would be
actually audible is another thing altogether. Audio is a very subjective.
Regards
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Kind regards
Pioneer Europe NV (UK Branch)
Customer Relations Department
http://www.pioneer.co.uk
http://contactcenter.pioneer.eu/contactus.nsf/contact?openform&sub=pgb&lang=en
Tel - 0330 123 1240 or 0870 600 1539
I have owned several TEAC and TASCAM products.
I currently uses a TASCAM CD200 that uses the CD-5020A drive unit. I feed
the digital output into a high quality external DAC.
Is there any reason why the digital data stream from a VDRS transport (as
used in Esoteric) should be any better than from the CD-5020A transport?
Surely both provide perfectly accurate digital data streams?
Kind regards