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Best CD player for headphone setup

I am putting together a headphone system for my home office and am looking for suggestions for a CD player that would complement the other two components in the setup, a Headroom Max headphone amplifier and a pair of Sennheiser HD600 headphones. Some listening might also be done with my Grado SR225. My budget for a used player is $1000 +/- $250 (i.e. $750-$1250), but would prefer to stay towards the lower end. For reference, I listen to a lot of acoustic music, bluegrass, small combo and solo jazz, and some electric, early fusion, modern "jambands". Your thoughts would be sincerely appreciated, since it's been some time since I shopped for CD player in this price range.
gmorse
gallaine
114 posts
 
I also am putting together a headphone system. I have the headphones but nothing else so far. With a budget of around $1000 you might consider the setup I have in my main system. For about $500 you can get the MSB Link DAC III with the 24/96 upsampling module and the Aiwa XC-37M five disc changer for another $80-$90. I compared this to my previous reference - a Roksan Caspian CD Player (~$1600). Both sound excellent; but one is nearly a 1/3 the cost of the other. Stan Warren has a mod for the changer that costs about $120; I haven't tried it yet. Your total cost is less than $750.
jeffloistarca
1,004 posts
 
You don't see too many used units on the market, but if you're patient I would suggest a Dynaco tubed CDP. My Dynaco CDV-2 works great with my Senn 600's, and the two tubes glowing in the window on the front of the Dynaco look cool. I suspect you could pick up a CDV-2 for around $400
oz_enterprises's avatar
oz_enterprises
10 posts
 
Why not go for a Jolida tube cd player, or Roksan's new Kandy cd player. Or as the previous p ost sugggests, get a good/cheap japanese plyer with a diogital out and an outboard upsampler or d/a. But if it's for a home office, then desk space is probably a premium and you want to keep the number of boxes to a minimum :-)
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