Using a lap top cd drive instead of highend cd player

Well, not disagreeing that it will sound better than many CD players, but if you change the question to how do I get best sound out of my computer as a digital source then you need to consider:
- linear power supplies vs. typical wall warts
- type of cabling and specific cables of your chosen format 
- steps you can take to minimize electrical noise and RFI getting to your dac (e.g. google "Regen") 
- music playing software
- ss vs. mechanical spinning drives
- what O/S you run and all the non-audio processes that run and add noise to the music signal
I'm probably forgetting about 6 things, but you get the idea. It's a deep subject and few computer audio setups sound alike. Cheers,
Spencer

So I am missing something.

Apologies. I failed to mention I run a Prodigy cube (converter side only) in between the laptop and the DAC. A 75 ohm coax cable connects the Prodigy to the DAC and and USB from laptop to prodigy. The AN does not have a usb input. 

Standard Win 10. SS HD and foobar 2000 as a player.

Audionote DACs only 1x upsample.

I was just trying to figure out whether your DAC is slaved to the PC.  If so you could have significant jitter in your setup.  A good quality transport would be feeding the DAC with excellent timing.  

Thanks for all the input.

I had a look for a CD transport but found cd players and transports all listed together. What inputs / outputs are different on a transport and what connections must a cd player have to make it usable as a transport only.

Thanks

I agree you're not getting the best jitter correction in your setup. There are several versions of the Audio Note DAC3.1, they are either NOS or 1xoversampling Dacs and do not upsample. To achieve the highest SQ, it's important to have jitter correction in front of the Dac.

A good transport will have a master clock to correct jitter. There are other benefits over a laptop CD drive such as vibration control and a higher quality lens. Some transports use a buffer after reading the disc to correct read errors.
And a good quality 75 ohm coax cable is needed for S/PDIF input to the DAC.