My head hurts....

The future is in digital servers.

Keep the CD player and take a look at the Roku Soundbridge to broaden your variety of music available. If you have a high speed Internet connection, you can use it to play countless very decent sounding Internet radio stations right out of the can.

If you have a PC and a wireless or wired network at home, you can rip your disks to a loss less file format on disk and start to experiment with a music server.

You can feed a DAC or other digital processors from the Roku to upgrade the sound quality as well if desired.

If you get another CD, make sure it has digital outputs and inputs so you might use it as a transport or DAC alone down the road as well if desired.

"Begin with what you have now. it might surprise you what can be done with it."

Absolutely. try what you have before convincing yourself it ain't any good. You might be surprised.

You can and with the rate at which this technology is evolving, probably will always upgrade later.

I just started a music server by enabling media sharing in Windows Media Player in Vista on a laptop. IT works very nicely. The Windows Media Player interface for ripping CDs to disk is very fast . I ripped the 5 CD Ken Burns JAzz CD set yesterday in about 30 minutes.

Once the song is ripped it is categorized by artist, album, and genre. I can then select to play a specific song, album, or set of songs by an artist or in a genre using the Roku Soundbridge on my system.

Last night I had several dozen classic jazz tunes playing randomly on my system via Wifi conenction to my Vista PC for several hours. Sound quality is very good out of the can.

I do have a new outboard DAC coming though in order to try something different and maybe even better. But the sound as is is quite competitive already.

Sweet......

Musicfile,

If your still out there and looking, do the DAC thing!