help a Die hard ANALOG guy choose a budget CDP

I'll be the outlier here.  I've dabbled in Computer Audio, and currently use a Bluesound whole home system.  I still get my greatest enjoyment from popping a disc into a transport, sending it to a DAC, and enjoy!  No operating system hassles, no Drm issues...and my DAC is agnostic about inputs...hard drives and spinning discs sound equally great .

My point is...

If someone is spending $XXX (say $4,000) total on a front end source...

There is NO WAY any CD player will touch a DAC at that same price.

I stopped spinning CDs about 6 years ago and never looked back... it has been proven to me time and time again by demonstration and in the transformation of friends' systems from CD to DAC.  Getting up to search for/change CDs is more time consuming than sitting in a chair with an iPad with access to 25,000 songs at your fingertip.

First things first: audition Naim budget CD player if u can: CD5 or used CD3, these should go for under a thou. My CDS3 or my older CDX cannot beat my Keel-ed Sondek/Aro but they do sound "alive" playing CDs...
ripping my collection of a few thousand classical CDs did not work out for me: all the copies of the 9th ended into one folder and its a full-time job to rename tags as No.9, No9, #9, etc...plus with all new boxes ($1 per CD) coming up I do need a CD player... For pop musik a laptop and DAC should suffice, plus considering the amount of compression for the sake of winning the "loundness war" and all the butchering during mastering, even MP3 files sound as good as FLAC.
read the last chapter in Schiit Happened by Mike Moffat of Theta Digital: he left the industry when decent DACs became unavailable, Naim bought whatever was left out there in the early 90-ies, so if CD5 is HDCD- compatible, it should sound OK, otherwise a spinner and a decent DAC from, say, schiit, is your ticket..........

@Sevs Are those Naims the ones with the cool looking tray that swings out with a curved front, sorta like a corner cabinet? Is parts availability an issues? Cheers,
Spencer

Yes, its them! My CDS3 had its laser mech excanged three(!) times by AVOptions, but my older "olive series" CDX works non-stop for 17 years now without any glitches. I am Very happy with Naim service... My experience with Linn was not this pleasurable: when my Linn Classik needed a tuneup (laser sled mech became noisy) the responce was that its 10years old, they won't touch it. I had to fix it myself, got lucky! Same with my Wadia 781i: Wadia response was that if anything happens they will fix it but they don't have spare transports/laser mechanisms. And my Wadia was still under warranty at that time, truly amazing how some companies operate :-(
I also had Krell SACD Standard until it died on me, like all those first SACD players from Krell and Musical Fidelity. Loved the looks of McIntosh SACD player but it sounded too "polite" (some call it "fluid") to my tastes, so I sold it here on Audiogon. What else... Bought Linn Akurate but its digital power supply f$&@-ed the rest of my all-Naim system so I had some fun time returning it to my local Linn dealer for a credit.
Sorry, I talk too much about SACD players but there is a Lot of excellent SACDs in classical music these days, and the prices are lower than hi-def downloads