To Wireless200,
It is much to my surprise that the SB is 85% of the Apollo in terms of SQ. I was considering getting the Apollo as well, thinking it would be a big improvement over the SB. But now guess I shouldn't get my expectations too high... Also to my surprise is the Transporter is inferior than the Apollo in your case, considering it is double the price of the Apollo. But I will see when I get mine.
To Cerrot,
I do think the peripherals for your SB have something to do with its SQ. In fact, this is exactly the reason why I posted this thread - to add the right peripherals to the SB in order to maximize the SQ of a SB as much as possible.
To Cruz123,
I just looked at Bolder Cable's website, and their mods do not really attack the jitter issues, as they do nothing with clocking/reclocking. But I think the digital mod still looks worthwhile. I looked at Empirical Audio's website as well, while they don't currently have any mods for SB, they do have the Pace-Car to reclock signals out of SB, not exactly cheap though. How about Bold Cable's Digital Mod + E.A. Pace-Car? would be a big step up from the stock SB digital output. What do you guys think? or is anyone already doing this?