I would think twice about spending $1000 for a CD player based on my recent experience. IMO, you should investigate some of the budget DVD players I'd probably look at the Pioneer DV-333) with the view to doing some very inexpensive tweaks relating to vibration and resonance control. I recently sold an Arcam Alpha 8SE because my RCA 5223P DVD player (definitely not much of a name in audiophile circles) was pretty much the equal of the Arcam at about 1/3 of the price (even less if it's still available on-line). I am not going to say that ALL the RCA players are great, because these large companies very often change their players significantly from year to year. What I can tell you is that the 5223P is a very fine sounding CD player. I've taken good care (as I did with the Arcam) to isolate the player properly (sandbags, proper shelving, vibrapods) and use decent interconnects from the player to my integrated (Silver Audio Silver Bullet 6.0's), and used a quality line conditioner with both the Arcam and the RCA. Since I sold the Arcam, I've further improved the performance of the RCA with a cheap $10 anti-resonance tweak and now use a Cardas Golden power cord (that I used on the Arcam) on the RCA through an adapter that Harmonic Tech has just come out with. In any event, I would be inclined to go cheaper on the player and spend the money on ancillaries which you can keep when you upgrade rather than blow $1000 on a player. I know from listening to the Arcam 9 and FMJ that I'd have to spend an outrageous amount of money to get a pretty marginal improvement. And if I was spending $1000 (I will never spend $2000 or $3000 on a CD player but that doesn't mean somebody else shouldn't), I'd probably investigate the higher end DVD players (maybe a Pioneer DV-37 which has a good reputation for sound) and do a power cord upgrade.
