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As I've told many people when I'm asked about stuff like this, try both side by side and see for yourself. I'd never stop someone from buying anything they like. We're all different. Personally, I have heard several transport/DAC set-ups recently. One had a very expensive DAC. That system had an NAD CD player in the system as well. We went back & forth between the two playback systems and we just couldn't hear any differences. No change in the highs or lows and certainly no change in the noise levels. To our ears, there was no difference. As I've said before, this is a good thing to me, because it saves me a bunch of money by not forcing me to upgrade.   To be honest, back in the days when my hearing was much better, I sampled a lot of CD players, probably close to a hundred players, and I was never able to tell much difference between any of them. There were stereo shops where I would compare CD player to CD player to CD player with the same CD with no discernible differences. I expected this because digital audio kinda works that way. The 1's and 0's get converted to analog and unless the player has a really shitty DAC, and I've yet to hear one that does, it will sound pretty much the same. The identical set of 1's and 0's simply cannot change the frequency response through a different DAC. Error correction can be improved, but error correction doesn't mess with the audio frequencies. Poor error correction just adds noise.

Indeed! (I like that bass/drums groove as well)

I do agree, that Kelley's Monk biography is not the best example of someone sticking to the essentials and only the essentials... (for instance, I am just reading John Chilton's Bechet biography and imho that one is perfect in keeping the balance between biographical information, gossip and music; also in talking about the music without getting overly technical), then again, genealogical research is not cockroaches in Texas; and while Kelley makes (iirc) some new contributions to our understanding of Monk's family history, I hope very much that the authors of that Dorham bio do not expand the world's knowledge about cockroaches in Texas...