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For me the issue you take with the appellation of the Item Audio Transport is one purely of semantics. For the record,  you say it is not a ‘cd transport.’ Well, the company does not make such a claim. They describe it as a digital transport, use inverted commas and then go on to explain exactly what it does and the options available. Onkyo call their ND-S1 docking station and Linn some of their players a digital transport. As anyone with a modicum of intelligence, I would just look up these companies’ website if I have any lingering doubt as to what exactly they do. This semantic discussion serves no purpose especially given that the owner of this forum has so little claim to being an authority in matters of linguistics.

Is there such a thing as a widely accepted definition of a digital transport? I do not think there is one. That’s why some companies use the word 'transport' when the unit fulfils the sort of function that a cd transport commonly fills, a cd transport maybe being safely defined as follows:

A CD Transport is a device which spins a CD, scans the optical data on the disc using a laser, decodes the data into one or more streams of numbers and codes this data into one or more digital audio formats. A Transport cannot drive a conventional power amplifier directly as it requires an external Digital-to-Analogue Converter (DAC) to do this.

You can see that there are two parts to this generally accepted definition, one positive and the other negative. Firstly, it spins dics and reads the noughts and 1s. This data is then coded in one or more digital formats. By analogy, an Item Audio equipped with an optional blu-ray drive would serve precisely this function. It would spin a disc, extract the data and code it so that it is available for the next stage in the chain. Regarding the negative part of the definition above, it suggests that a cd transport is one characterised by the lack of an onboard DAC. So this as well appears to be a characteristic of the Item Audio unit. I do not find any of their description misleading and would not take issue with their calling it a ‘transport’, although I would have preferred more time devoted to explaining how they address issues regarding the extraction of the digital data and coding it.

It appears to me that you are looking for a transport whose only function is to extract the data from multiple media discs, which would make it a universal transport. I think it is highly unlikely for there to be such a device uniquely devoted to reading discs available anywhere commercially. I am sure this function is fraught with difficulties but I do not see anyone investing resources in developing such a device from the grounds up in terms of both hardware and software.

Romy the Cat wrote:

Item, If the HFi World made the claim that your DAT1 sounds better playing the same track than their reference Cyrus CD Transport then it mean one of the following: 1)    That you bought more advertising in HFi World then Cyrus 2)    The HFi World editor when he matched the performance of your “transports” to an idiocy of a specific reviewer did a good job. It shell be the their choice: your DAT1 in fact might be better then this Cyrus CD Transport but what file your DAT1 played? It did not play optical driver in real time – you have no such an option - it played a file. So, how the file was ripped from disk and peace to HH for your DAT1 devise. What transport or CD-rom read the file, what software it was? Rgs, Romy the Cat

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