CD transport Question: Quality?

[maxw]

I have just aquired an Alpine 3900 DAC and have a question regard a CD transport:

Does the quality of a CD transport matter at all in terms of sound quality? if so, then why?

I figured that binary 10100 is 10100 wether it comes from a $80 DVD player or a high end CD player, make sense?

Thanks
Max

[wazzup]

The transport matters. Quite a lot actually, if you a good setup.
Reducing vibrations and deticated power supplies they all matter in a transport.

[DougL]

I figured that binary 10100 is 10100 wether it comes from a $80 DVD player or a high end CD player, make sense?

As soon as you transform digital into a bit stream, the jitter in the bit stream can have a profound impact on the sound.

I tend to think of it as digital magnitude with "analog" timing.
Since it’s the transports job to "create" the timing, it’s a significant part of the overall system.

Just my two cents.

Doug

[maxw]

Originally posted by DougL


As soon as you transform digital into a bit stream, the jitter in the bit stream can have a profound impact on the sound.

I tend to think of it as digital magnitude with "analog" timing.
Since it’s the transports job to "create" the timing, it’s a significant part of the overall system.

Just my two cents.

Doug

Ahh, yes that makes sense. I know what jitter is and how important it is from some Fibre Channel stuff I was looking at. Thanks!

[hummhoom]

Jitter is fairly important to digital audio. The whole concept is to sample a signal at discrete points in time, and then reproduce the samples in the same sequence, and at the exact same speed. A steady clock is very important for this. There's a fairly high tolerance for data clocked into a DAC, the clock would have to be way off for a 1 to be read as 0 and vice versa. The low jitter clock is important for instructing the DAC on when to change the output from one code to another.

As for virbrations in the transport, well that's a load of hogwash. Vibration in the transport is only a problem if the vibration is bad enough to cause a skip. No transport is skip proof. No mechanical system will be immune to vibration, that's a veritible fact. You can tune it to specific frequency, and dampen it, but if can never be eliminated.