Question Cambridge Audio CXC vs. Yamaha CDX-660 as transport

[Dorking Dude]

I'm using a 25 year old Yamaha CDX660 CD player as a transport, connected via a premium coax cable to a Cambridge Audio CXN. I'm wondering if sound quality would be improved by swapping the Yamaha for the Cambridge Audio CXC transport? Basically I don't know how much of the 'work' is done by the transport and how much by the DAC. Although the Yamaha is old (very!) it works perfectly, so maybe its age doesn't matter? Any thoughts/ advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

[larkone]

The sound is governed by the DAC and the downstream kit, not the transport, That is providing it is working to spec which you say it is.

 

[Dorking Dude]

Thank you. I suppose I was interested in views on things like clock speed and jitter, which I have read is where different transports vary in performance (and if they are delivering 'bad data' to the DAC, does the DAC sort it out via error correction or will the final sound always be compromised by the transport not reading the disc as accurately as it could?). I'm wary of falling down the rabbit hole of inaudible technical irrelevancies, but if there really is an audible difference between transports I'd be interested. Thanks again.

 

[larkone]

You are looking into a very deep rabbit hole. CD error correction is carried out by the transport using Cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon Code (Circ).

Cross-interleaved Reed–Solomon coding - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

How your DAC handles timing errors is another matter. Some handle it better than others. If you want to try and eliminate you would need a transport and DAC that some form of word clock control between them - typically very expensive transports and DACs - Wadia, dCS.


You will get more pleasure spending the money on fixing the bigger issues such as how is your room influencing or impacting the sound from your speakers