Cd or DVD trans for Bel Canto Dac 1

It's probably a question of what your 'ears prefer.' I tried a Pioneeer DVD with a TOSlink connectection and compared it to a coaxial connection to a cd player similar to your Rotel 971. To my ears, the cd/coaxial seemed quite a bit better.
Good luck.

I tried the Bel Canto with a Pioneer DV-05 Elite DVD player, a borrowed Denon DVD player, a Phillips DVD player, and a Meridian 508 CD player used as a transport. I tried all units with both cd/coax and toslink, and several different brands of both types of cable over a period of a couple of months. I liked the Meridian-coax combination best--more warmth and body while retaining the clarity and smoothness of the DVD-toslink combos. I know the Bel Canto Co. favors the DVD-toslink route but that didn't match my experience.

Wow...small world: I too compared the Bel Canto DAC1 driven by the Pioneer 333 DVD w/ 2m toslink vs my Rotel CDP.
The former sounded too soft and "whitish" up top. The latter was better, but NOT noticeably so to justify purchase of the DAC. My Rotel is the older, heavier 855, which, however, is preferred by Rotel's service reps over the 9 series because of the better transport Rotel used to use. So there MAY be a difference unaccounted for here. Nevertheless, after damping the Rotel a bit, and then mounting it on a Neuance isolation platform, I was amazed at how good it sounds! (Treble grain and hash reduce. Note that Virtual Mode (maker of fine passive preamps) uses a damped 855 as their reference for preamp voicing!). It's hard to know how to steer system evolution with so many chefs, eh? Still, I returned the 'Canto and learned a lesson: trust my ears. After demoing ARCAM 9 and ARC CD, I still prefer the properly-isolated Rotel. It's almost embarassing to admit this...I feel sometimes that I have to go out and buy a CD55 for $2400 or
the Sony 777 for $1600 and "get real", but I'm still not sure when the format tech curve is ripe enough to make a safe move upward. Good luck...and try that Neuance. Ernie