If the old pioneer is working properly and you go through the same dac it should work fine. I think the weak link of that player was the slow write speed.
Are all red book cd transports created equal?
Quite simply the transport on my rega Jupiter is failing and I have an old pdr-19rw pioneer elite that has the same digital output. In theory bits are bits right? Should I swap them out or will the old unit sound as inferior as all those original cd’s did?