best transport?

What price range?

Friend

Transports - look at Mark Levinson (used),Muse (used), or Oppo BD83SE (new). Not too sure about the Oppo's ditial out circuit - but it can do the Bluray thing when you are not using it as a transport. This gives you a component that can do more than one thing.

As far as DAC's go - the Benchmark has set the bar for performance unless you have more tha $5K to spend. If so, look at Weiss.

I second Mark Levinson.

Sonic Frontiers SFT-1
Theta Jade

you will need to experiment, becuase dacs are often transport sensitive. you won't have an answer until you have tried several.

for example, my favorite transport is the digital out of the vincent cd-s6--a phillips mechanism.

i could not predict the outcome of combining it with your dac.

i assume when you say "best", you mean, "favorite", re your preferences based upon your (idiosyncratic) criterion of excellence of sound quality.