Kruppy, thanks for dragging discocarp out of the woods.
Kruppy never lets me go camping! Seriously though, I've had a very hectic few months hehe. I have one less appendix than I did on my old posts, our buyer fell through on selling our house, and we had to back out of our new house. Its been a rough summer! I still lurk though.
As for the transporter, here's the thing. If you are just going to use it to play music from your own server in your house, it works GREAT and sounds even better. I've never had a single lockup when using it to just connect to my home server and stream flacs.
However, if you ever get on squeezenetwork, it seems to lock up somewhat frequently, especially on rhapsody. When I first got it, it was locking up constantly. I went through support and they were able to fix the main bug. So its not worthless for internet streaming now. It DOES still lock up though.
As for the DAC functions, the optical works sometimes. Sometimes not. It can get these incredibly obnoxious grating sounds sometimes out of the blue. If you switch play to the digital coax (or bnc or anything) and back to optical it fixes it. But its really, really obnoxious when it happens. And it happens without warning. The digi coax input seems to work fine, its just the optical. I haven't tried any of the other digital ins.
IMO the transporter is a great start. But it is definately a first gen product, and you have to be willing to live with that. If I had it to do over, I'd probably go for the SB3/dac combo.