daveyf, you must have read my mind! I had just picked up a replacement CD player in anticipation of selling my Esoteric. It is a perfect wave transport and a PS Audio NuWave Dac. It pales in comparison to the Esoteric! Thinking about it, does a new buyer of an Esoteric CD player care about servicing the player 15 years down the road? Probably not. Anyone willing to shell out $13,000 for a cd player is going to trade it in at maybe eight years or so. Does Esoteric feel obligated to maintain their players for 2nd or 3rd generation owners? Probably not. So. right now I'm in limbo. Maybe I'll have to bite the bullet and let TAP send it back to Japan one day. Right now it's working great. I was somewhat troubled by the information given to me by TAP. I'm not sure that they did ANYTHING to my player beyond a cleaning by means of a cleaning disc. That's another conversation though and only a gut feeling on my part. Can anyone recommend a CD player they feel equals the Esoteric? Thank you. Joe