Hello, Eric!
I am also wrestling with this question at this time. My humble opinion is that what matters most is the lack of jitter emanating from the CD player's (or transport's) digital interface and not whether the machine also has DACs and an analog output stage inside it as well as a CD transport mechanism. The problem is, as far as I know, there is no way to know what these jitter numbers are for most machines out there. I have been trying to determine if my Sony CDP-XA7ES is as good a transport as a Sonic Frontiers SFT-1 and there is simply no information, or even opinions on this question out there. Common sense says that the SFT-1 blows the Sony away in spite of the Sony's transport mechanism being a work of industrial art. But where is the empirical data?
I am also wrestling with this question at this time. My humble opinion is that what matters most is the lack of jitter emanating from the CD player's (or transport's) digital interface and not whether the machine also has DACs and an analog output stage inside it as well as a CD transport mechanism. The problem is, as far as I know, there is no way to know what these jitter numbers are for most machines out there. I have been trying to determine if my Sony CDP-XA7ES is as good a transport as a Sonic Frontiers SFT-1 and there is simply no information, or even opinions on this question out there. Common sense says that the SFT-1 blows the Sony away in spite of the Sony's transport mechanism being a work of industrial art. But where is the empirical data?