A couple worth considering: Emotiva ERC2 currently on sale for $400. XTZ CD 100 I own both players (along with a Rega Apollo). Both excellent players. Track down the Emotiva review in Stereophile and the XTZ review in Hi Fi World. Rich |
Unless you really want a one-box replacement for the dying CDP a reasonable approach might be to buy a good DAC in the $300 range and the best CDP or DVD player you can find for $200 to use as a transport. There are some remarkably good mid-priced DACs out there, likely better than the DAC you're going to find in most $500 CD players, and they don't have to be thrown away when the transport dies. And transports all die sooner or later. I convinced one of my friends to buy a used Musical Fidelity VDAC v1 when I saw one here, for less then $200, and he was very pleasantly surprised that it sounded much better to him than the Ah! Njoe Tjoeb CD or Pioneer Elite universal player he'd spent considerable money on, using either of those as a transport through the VDAC. You have to make sure there's a digital output on the transport that's the same type as the digital input on the DAC but that's about as complicated as the setup gets. |
