DAC or new player ?

Tobias is right. We are at the beginning of a new era of digital music and it is nonsense to buy a dedicated cd-player. Get one good dac (actually, such like an apogee mini dac, or even at half price of that a TC konnekt 8 or Edirol UA 101) allows you to have a very well balanced dac, adc (dont forget: these are studio gears and not voiced to be a coloured niche products for serving one particular taste packed into a nice box to please your eye. A TEAC VRDS and old Sony ES player as transport would nicely complement such a gear.

You may want to invest only to a relatively cheap teac vrds cd-palyer and use it as a transport instead of a more expensive dedicated transport. I use vrds 10SE, and that is just fine. It may lacks the refinement of many highend transports, but it has a very dynamic and full bandwith soundprint. Surely, better than (for me) than a ML39 as transport.