Recently My system consists an oppo 983h (music cd transport) or a toshiba blue ray player for video and streaming, mostly netflix or pandora. They feed a matrix mini i dac > musical fidelity pre > quad 12L active speakers. I have found the oppo to sound just slightly better than the tosh 2250 as a transport.
Lately I have been educating myself about computer audio options to store and play music files. That has been frustrating because of all the options and when i finally decided to go to a SB touch, they stopped production (wtf). So i just have not put together that part of my system yet. IN the meantime I have been reading about jitter, clocks, software, hard drives, dacs etc etc.
A few years ago I used a toshiba sd-9200 as a dvd player and cd player and really enjoyed the sound quality. I wanted a one box solution to a combined multi channel home theater and 2 channel set up and it was awesome for that. Then I moved and ditched the multi channel and went 2.1 and have been very happy. Enter HDMI so around 2008 or so I went to the oppo 983h and put the 9200 in the closet. The 9200 is a large heavy machine, nice copper chassis, that had a msrp of $1995 back in 2001. Stereophile did a review and at that time they claimed it has low jitter numbers. I started wondering how it would compare to my oppo, so I pulled it out this weekend and dusted it off.
Well yesterday I fired it up, digital out to my dac, and HOLY CRAP, there was a substantial improvement! The music was more relaxed and natural, more texture in all areas, detail-detail, better sound stage and improvement in dynamics. This was a very pleasant surprise. I cant find jitter measurements on the oppo and I don't know if that is the issue. With this heavy cooper clad machine there must be an improvement in RF and emi.
I have also considered upgrading my dac, as pacific valve offer some mods here:
http://www.pacificvalve.us/MatrixBalanced.htmlThen again I get torn between "modding" the equipment or upgrading to better stuff.
Anyway, I'm enjoying the transport change, Cheers!