I'm a lover of good audio but I don't consider myself an "audiophile". Why? Well I don't agree with a lot of the common beliefs that go with that label. For example I think DACs are important, but I don't think that the average person can hear the difference between an amplifier with a toridial power supply, and I certainly thing that polarised HDMI cables are sheer crazy town.... The problem is a lot of these claims are very subjective, and really can't be proven. However recently I did hear a crazy claim that is easy to prove one way or another. The claim that a CD transport, or CD player that is only used (and often only can) to produce a digital output for a DAC, will produce better results with a better power supply.
Now I can't prove this 100%. And I'm certainly am not going to spend the $20,000 I've seen some of these cost. But what I can do is copy to a wave file a CD twice, and do a TwinSeek differential check. Which I did.
How? Using two different but standard CD drives, one internal on a PC and another external on a laptop. If they end up the same each time surely that means that making a digital stream of a CD is not a hard task? I think so....
Anyway, to cut this post short. The processes matched.... but the files from the different computers (produced by two different programs) did not. I'm assuming that they have different headers, but I will investigate further!
But for now I recommend saving your money on your CD transport and spending it on a good DAC, Amp and speakers....
