dcs puccini, chord red ref, meitner cdsa or nagra

That's very Meitner of you ;) My philosophy has always been reliability first because no matter how good a unit sounds, if it's not working you're getting zero performance (i.e., less performance than any working CDP). Of course, if the sonics aren't there, then all the reliability in the world isn't going to help you :)

Concur, although I think it would have been fine if they had kept the edges straight instead of having them draw back. For me though, my big issue with that player is the scarcity of information; you would think that if it was using an Esoteric transport, that would be prominently indicated. I don't have 10K of faith in me.

I think for 10K, there should be something in writing besides what's out there.

That wasn't what I was trying to say. I don't particularly care if it's on a web page but where are the complete specs *including* transport type?

Which one? It would be fantastic if someone could just indicate from the pdf file at the bottom of this page (note that there are multiple implementations of VOSP as well as VRDS) which particular VRDS or VOSP implementation is in this player:

http://teac.com/esoteric/Disc_transports_VOSP_and_VRDS-Neo.html

Too bad, hiding the ball isn't the way to make potential customers comfortable.