Quote Originally Posted by basite
The most noticable improvement was when I wallmounted my tt, and put spikes underneath it.
Hmmm, I should have specifically mentioned turntables in my initial post. My belief is that a lot of the notions about vibration control started with turntables (and rightfully so, since vibration is a definite problem for turntables) and have been passed on to other components such as cd players, amps and speakers...

But even though vibration control might be essential for a TT, that doesn't mean other components will receive the same (if any) benefit from it.

Frankly, I also believe that most of the 'source first' arguements also started with the TT and eventually migrated to the early CD players and now current models. Despite having very limited experience with TT's, I know they can sound quite different and simple mods can alter/improve their performance greatly. However, I'm still not convinced that the current generation of digital players are as diverse in sound.

Just recently I've read two CD Player reviews that I found really interesting... One was in Stereophile: the review of the Marantz SA8001... in which the reviewer admitted to not being able to tell the difference between the 8001, the Benchmark DAC1 and his reference Marantz (either SA15S1 or SA11S1). Then I read another review recently (I think from stereo times) where the reviewer couldn't tell the difference between the Benchmark DAC1 and the Marantz CD5001. While I would expect all 3 Marantz models to sound somewhat similiar (based on the Marantz 'house sound') and I can imagine that Benchmark might also have a similiar sound, I really would expect the reviewers to be able to easily pick between a $300, a $900, a $2K CD player and a $1K DAC, if the difference in digital sources is as massive as some claim.