They do. All you have to do is listen. The difference between you and me on this point (aside from your belief in numbers over the live experience) is that I listen and enjoy, and you merely listen and read.

Transports, cables, and how they both combine with different DAC's do make differences. Of course, if you are, er, "sonically" challenged, you may not hear these differences. Or, you may be merely prejudiced in your reporting of the argument.

But anyone who loves music can hear these differences. Subtle or obvious though they may be, music lovers hear them. And they matter.

If you don't hear them, perhaps a trip to your ear doctor could clear up the problem. Of course, if you have cognative problems in processing the signals, then perhaps a good Neurologist (or shrink) could solve the problem.

Those of us who can hear, listen and make the adjustments. Those or you who cannot hear, simply rail against those of us who can.

Hey. Thank your lucky stars. You get to live on the cheap, without ever knowing what you are missing.

You give "deaf and dumb" a new, transcendent meaning. Just turn 'er up and enjoy.

more cable questions? a recent experience at my house is illustrative. a friend offered to bring his phonopre for me to try out as my preamp has a built-in stage that i use regularly. i wanted to see if i could hear any improvement. several of us gathered that day. i hooked the unit in place of my cd player using the power cord and nordost red-dawn interconnects i regularly use with the cd. it sounded very good, lively and bouncy. my friend then announced that he had brought the audioquest interconnects that he usually used at home. we put them in. one would have had to have been deaf not to hear the difference. it was astounding. in a word, they were completely flat sounding in that application.
can i explain why it sounded so different? no. was it different, totally. i have never heard a clearer difference in my years in this hobby and the only variable was those interconnects.

Just to expand on my point regarding the mechanism and reading the CD in realtime, which can be shown quite easily there are read errors when looking at 3rd party ripping software; PS Audio seems to have designed a mechanism/transport with exactly this in mind.

Basically it behaves similar to EAC and reads the track multiple times comparing it to what it stores in memory, the validated read is then sent out.
So this breaks the requirement of realtime read and interpolation errors caused by time limitations and synchronous transmitting.

But as I said earlier, how much of an issue this is comes down to speculation and hearing preferences.
However in theory the PS Audio PerfectWave should be the perfect player.
So it lowers the cost of the mechanism component (used OEM DVD-ROM), but increases the cost by use of the buffering re-read operation and engineering solution to send it.

So no cheap products out there unless you are one whose opinions are that the errors and read/output stage circuitry are negligible.
For others this product definitely looks interesting as it covers a lot of what is being discussed here.

Cheers
Orb