The Squeezebox has toslink and and rca outs, and it sounds great, but it is only as good as your dac.
I think the squeezebox could easily replace a 3 or 4 thousand dollar CD player, provided you are feeding a worthy dac. I use it with a dCS Delius/Purcell and get fantastic results.
But the important thing is that it will allow you easy access to your music library, which is not just a convenience anymore--it is really the best way to exploit whatever system you have.
You'll wind up playing things you would never hunt through your CD collection to play, just because it is at your fingertips. I know of some people who are selling some very expensive audiophile hardware and are replacing it with USB dacs that are sonically inferior in everyway. I think they enjoy the hard drive functionality so much that they are willing to make sacrifices in sound quality.
The problem is that right now there aren't many really good standalone dacs that are reasonably priced but there are almost no CD players with digital inputs for music servers.
I think the squeezebox could easily replace a 3 or 4 thousand dollar CD player, provided you are feeding a worthy dac. I use it with a dCS Delius/Purcell and get fantastic results.
But the important thing is that it will allow you easy access to your music library, which is not just a convenience anymore--it is really the best way to exploit whatever system you have.
You'll wind up playing things you would never hunt through your CD collection to play, just because it is at your fingertips. I know of some people who are selling some very expensive audiophile hardware and are replacing it with USB dacs that are sonically inferior in everyway. I think they enjoy the hard drive functionality so much that they are willing to make sacrifices in sound quality.
The problem is that right now there aren't many really good standalone dacs that are reasonably priced but there are almost no CD players with digital inputs for music servers.