Love my BCD1 (as you all know due to my spare parts anxiety). If I get me a BDA would there be a significant improvement overall (due to the twin Crystal dacs ).I always thought that going to the outboard dac idea was to risk greater jitter compared to keeping everything in a single chassis. Do I need to be concerned with the Bryston combo? Thanks for any opinions . :
You are correct in your thoughts about higher jitter with an outboard DAC, and there is no such thing as jitter elimination with re-sampling and re-clocking techniques, they can attenuate jitter somewhat but never remove it. Claims at jitter removal come from poor ears or marketing spin.
Having said that, any difference you hear between BCD-1 analog output and its digital output feeding BDA-1 that in turn provides analog signal will not give you an insight into the impact of jitter because you will also hear the difference in DAC chips, filters, analog sections, etc.
I did a proper comparison a while back and it was clear that any digital transport introduced jitter that was audible, and that single box top tier CD player was better than top tier digital transport sending signal to the same CD player on its digital input.
The difference however was not significant and I did stay with digital transport and DAC (BDA-1 in my case) due to its convenience (which will be dropped soon since I will be using digital cross-over in active speakers).
If you want to leave the world of spinners behind, BDP-1 with BDA-1 would provide very good performance and you can rest assured that you would not miss BCD-1.