Your CD player puts out a signal that is what 'drives' the DAC. If your needs are for a better than budget DAC the Audiolab is a good value choice to so use.
Back in the 90's, DACs were important, perhaps. Though, even then, there were inexpensive DACs in CD players that were revered, and still hold up to a controlled comparison. The difference is those DACs didn't pretend to do anything but 16/44, and didn't have to interface with computers. Separate DACs were expensive. Some explored really interesting ideas that were challenging to implement in three dimensions, but that gained incremental advantages, perhaps, in measured performance. The RingDAC is possibly one such. These strategies worked around the speed at which signal processing could occur at the necessary bit depth, to avoid even microscopic error rates. CD transports even from the earliest days could deliver the bits to the DAC without error, and were doing so in computers at speeds higher, and a little later much higher than required by CD playback.
But time marches on. The chips used these days work so much faster than 16/44 that they can throw most of their signal processing power away and still have too much for Redbook CD. And the implementations around those chips are now so clean that they are 20 or 30 dB better than they need to be to attain effective transparency--and that's measured at the audio outputs. They are so good that one can stack a DAC and ADC together and feed audio through them, converting to analog, redigitizing, converting that again to analog, digitizing that again, and so on for many generations with no audible degradation in the sound under controlled testing (assuming lossless encoding, of course). And the DACs that do this are now at commodity pricing--by that I mean I don't need One DAC To Rule Them All--I buy a new DAC for each situation in which I want to perform the conversion instead of trying to figure out how to manage the switching to use a single DAC.
There are expensive DACs that perform really well, of course, and provide many attributes some might be seeking, particularly connectivity features, source switching features, aesthetics, build quality, country of origin, story, ownership experience, and so on. People who want an expensive DAC don't have to justify it. But they should be aware of what they are and are not getting. I see little correlation between output and price.
So, I would alter your statement above to say "the Audiolab transport will not hold back even the best DACs, which you can choose as you like to fulfill your other needs and desires." I've never owned one, but I believe this will be true simply because it's really difficult to build a CD transport that would prevent a DAC from getting the data that's on the CD accurately.
The same could be said of the Cambridge Audio CXC, and most quality CD players with digital outputs that are in a state of good repair. Keeping them in good repair is most of what differentiates transports in my experience.
Rick "whose first DAC was in a Magnavox CD player, and whose latest DAC is a Topping E30" Denney