Looking for CD players with digital inputs.

Yes, knowing how much you want to shell out would be most helpful.

At any rate, the Audiolab 8200CD/8200CDQ would fit the bill for what you are after. It has 2 optical, 2 coax inputs plus Asynch USB. The 8200CD is around a grand and the CDQ is around $1399.

There aren't a lot of dealers in the US but there are for sure a few.

I will have an 8200CDQ sometime Mid-April and will let you guys know what I think of it when it comes in. There have been some minor production issues on the early units from what I can tell and the newest version with 12v trigger should essentially have all of the bugs worked out.

The Cary 306 would be a great option as well, I was considering spending upwards of $5k myself but eventually decided that digital is moving too fast to invest too much at this point. Lots of great things on the horizon in that regard.

Without knowing budget, here's a listing of CD players/brands that have digital inputs:

All Ayon CD players (http://www.ayonaudio.com/products/cd-player-dac.html)
All Playback Designs CD/SACD players (http://www.playbackdesigns.com/)
dCS Puccini (http://www.dcsltd.co.uk/product/puccini-cd-sacd-player#tab_overview)
Aesthetix Romulus (http://www.aesthetix.net/introducing.php)
Esoteric SA-50, K-01/K-03 (http://esoteric.teac.com/audio_players/)
Cary 303T and 306 SACD Pro (http://www.caryaudio.com/products/classic.html)
Cambridge Audio 840C (http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/summary.php?PID=112&Title=Summary)

I am sure there are many more but hopefully this gives you a goo dplace to start researching. Good luck.

Wadia.

It's quite reasonable to use a cd player. The Quad is quite nice for an older, devalued piece. The Quad could also support both direct and variable outputs so you would not need a preamp. Be cautious as the first gens had unreliable transports. Later gens were fine.

That being said, in general the newer dac's on the market are quite a bit better than most of the CD players with digital inputs that I have heard. They simply have better chips and some fairly nice dejitter technologies.

A note on the apple tv as a high falutin music source. If you are using an older model that had the hard drive built in, you will get a little better sound from the hard drive. The newer model that is streaming only gives audio sound with a fairly high level of jitter. This is due to the network jump.

Disclaimer-I have ties to av industry.

$1,000 - $1500 range basically. But, the best alternative may be a Benchmark DAC HDR and keep my current Elite universal player (use analog outs for sacd/dvd-a). Then find a nicely priced pair of tube monoblocks