Looking for CD player recommendations that are a great match with Classe & Vandersteen

@xlinkaudio,
Good point about the decoding.
I bought a gold MFSL SACD Bob Dylan for $35 and compared it back-to-back with my standard CD for over an hour and had to conclude I couldn't tell the difference.
I can tell major differences in recording quality among all the discs I own, even grading them A,B,C,D for sound quality...

Tom

I have had what I think is a wonderful cd player, Simaudio Moon Supernova, for several years and enjoy it, but have been using it as a dac only to stream Tidal via a pc.  I have forgotten about cds.  Tidal offers 40 million tracks at redbook quality and are beginning to stream their "masters" which are at a higher resolution.  Like gdnrbob, I have not looked back.  I still pop in a cd occasionally just to confirm how good the streaming is.  Maybe a cdp with a digital input would offer you the best of both worlds.  Good luck.

Transport connected to DAC to preamp I found best reproduction! CD player??? Try Marantz!! Why??? Marantz and McIntosh are owned by same conglomerate! They share technology!

Best value under $1,000 right now in CD/SACD players is the Esoteric DV-50S.

For a contrarian view, I'd get a cheap Sony Blu-Ray Player like their pancake thick BX-37 which plays almost everything on silver discs, and run its output to a Meridian Direct DAC.  (Used to be called the "Director".). The Direct DAC uses Meridian's Apodizing filter from their Ultra DAC.  For less than $500 you'll have better sound than anything mentioned on this thread.