My Silver Phantoms one year later

[AlanD]

Agreed, Martin! There can be no difference. Doesn't seem to stop people imagining it though.

Yes.  This is especially true when it comes to the Phantom because it transfers data to an internal buffer.  So it's still the least common denominator.
What you have with traditional transport/DAC is 
a) RFI/EMI
Put a cellphone next to a cheap alarm-clock-radio.  When you get a phone call, there is a lot of static/noise that reaches the analog speaker.  In a setup with a coaxial SPDIF setup, there can be RFI/EMI transmitted from source to DAC. 

I think with the Phantom, really dirty power can contribute to this -- but I think the Silver's baseline amplifier noise is pretty high that using the stock power cables are fine.  I haven't listened to the Golds.

b) Jitter
This gets exaggerated to sell more expensive gear, but the easiest concept is to imagine that your source has zero jitter but the DAC has some jitter.  As it is converting the digital to analog signal, instead of new information at a sample rate of 44.1kHz it was now sometimes 44.0 and 44.2 kHz.  Since there is an analog component to it, can affect the results, especially with traditional oversampled DACs.

http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/digital-myth


A NON-reclocking DAC will get whatever signal is sent from the transport and that gets carried onto the eventual analog signal.

Again, in the Phantom, the whole thing is buffered.  With Spark, the actual FLAC file can be transferred into the Phantom's on-board memory. Therefore, you cannot modify the jitter in the system without internal modifications.