DAC or CD Player

What do you have now and how much do you want to spend? Knowing what's in the rest of the system would be useful info, too.

Thanks Fpeel I am having a ML pre/power set up with low end CD player and now have a choice of used ML36/36s or new 24/96kHz CD player. Shall I go CD/DAC or highend one box CDP? My budget is around $4000. Thanks.

Ugin, if your budget is $4000, you have plenty of options available. I would say to go with the one box player at that price range. For instance, you can pick up a used ML No. 39, Simaudio Moon Eclipse, or brand new Linn Ikemi for under $4k. The Ikemi won't do 24/96 but in actual fact, very few recordings employ it anyway (about as many as SACDs I think). And a 24/96kHz CD player can't really play 24/96kHz recordings unless it's a real DVD player (like a CAL CL-20) so you will need another DVD player as a transport! Personally, my next digital upgrade would probably be a Linn Ikemi because there are probably about half a million titles encoded on regular CD and probably about half a thousand that are encoded on SACD or 24/96.

Sit tight.wait for whats going to happen with DVD-A.If you want buy a used player in the time being spend about 500/700 and wait.4000k invested today could very well get you 1k a year from now.

I would not want to spend $4K on any player that could not be upgraded to 24/96K in the future. I would also recommend auditioning a Bel Canto Dac 1 before going for $4k on an all in one player. I have a friend who has a Theta transport and a Pro Gen V and the only area where the Gen V beats the Bel Canto is in bass slam.