DAC or CD Player. Help!

Congrats on your purchases. Are you using the player as a transport via the DAC?

I still and will always contend that expensive boutique cables are 100% snake oil. Some of the priciest manufacturers of this stuff hedge their claims 10 ways to Tuesday while struggling to make a case for their HUGE markups.

Take Zu Audio. I'll drop in the link at the bottom to their take on cable burn-in, but first you have to know why cable burn-in is even an issue. You pay 10-20x per foot what a decent piece of Belden or Monoprice cable costs and even though you want to hear that astounding difference your mind is telling you something else. So if the industry floats long burn-in times for cable, guess what's likely to happen after you've listened to these cables for many hours? That's right, you keep them. Or the return policy has expired. Either way you own them now. 

Take a look at Zu's take on burn-in. Count the weasel-words like "seems to", "potential to," and the endless prevarication and unsubstantiated claims, even when it involves their own "heavy investments in exploiting the phenomenon" did they actually write that? Yes, they did! They also write copious words signifying nothing to end with this:

"If they don’t sound awesome right out of the box, please give them time to loosen and warm up."

Read it for yourselves, and remember, snake oil comes off pretty easily. Buy yourself a spool of Monoprice 12AWG speaker wire, make two cables and then run a blind listening test whereby someone else switches them for your big buck foo-foo cable and guess which cable is hooked up. Run this test 5-10 times over the course of a couple days. Give it time. Track the guesses.

There's power in truth; save all that money and buy music with it. That is why you've invested 1000s in gear, right?

http://www.zuaudio.com/questions-list/2013/8/18/what-is-burn-in

Hi all. First post ever. Just dived into this fascinating rabbit hole a few weeks ago and trying to learn as fast as I can. Audiogon seems to be one of the best places to do this.
Sorry to take a perfectly intelligent question from the OP and make it unbelievably obtuse, but here's my confusion: a standard CD player (as opposed, I gather, to a pure "transport") must have a DAC, or something similar, built in, right? Otherwise how do the ones and zeros turn into an analog signal that feeds directly into the pre-amp/integrated/receiver? So if there's an analog signal coming out of the CD player...how does it make sense to run that signal into a standalone DAC? So there must be a separate output from the CD player that transmits an unconverted digital signal, bypassing the DAC (or whatever it is) inside the CD player, and this unconverted signal is what you would cable to the standalone DAC, thus making your CD player into a pure transport? I never noticed such an output on my 20-yr-old old Sony CD player, but I guess I never thought to look. Thanks for the education!

jamcl63, Welcome.  I'm in this rabbit hole since 2005 for the same reason - to learn.  You pretty much answered your own questions.  Yes CDP has its own D/A converter and analog electronics but it also has digital output providing serial stream of data called S/Pdif (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format).  As you noticed, CDP becomes a transport when this output is used instead of analog out.  Not every CDP has digital output.
Stream of zeros and ones on this output is being read by the DAC.  It is important to keep this stream of data steady since any time variation - a time jitter will convert into noise on analog side.

Thank you for clearing this up...I'd seen it written "SPDIF" and wondered. Lots to learn....