Count me in on the CAL tube DAC bandwagon. A mere $200-250 investment might surprise you as I was. I have a Sony DVD/SACD 9000 unit and hooking it up to a tube DAC made my regular red book CDs sound very good. I played my CAL DAC with cheaper CD players and the transports brought down the quality of sound which leads me to suggest if you have a good quality CD player, your transport could work well with a tube DAC. Also, use a digital cable (not fiber optic) between the CD transport and DAC. Spending big money for a tube CD player might not be necessary. I liked the CAL SIGMA so much I upgraded to the SIGMA II with a 3-6% improvement and moved SIGMA I to a second system. Finally, there's a SIGMA version with an upsample board and people like them. Me, I off the upgrade tredmill with my CDs as this combo is very pleasing.
