The best CD Player for the money

I have been building High Fidelity systems for 35 years. I searched diligently for primarily a transport but found a very cost effective CD player. I use an outboard DAC / Jitterbug combo. I have to say however, the built DAC using the Advanced Analog Devices AD1955 DACs with 384X oversampling filter. Is an interesting change from my piggybacked(80bit) (4) stacked 2x2 PCM63P-K 20bit Burr-brown ladder DAC chips.
The CD I speak of is the Emotiva ERC-2 listing @ 449.00 includes a five year warranty.

I cannot fault this unit as either a Fine (although slot load) transport or a full CD player. They offer a 30 trial and truly no hassle return policy. Have one sent, I don't think you will send it back. I did not.
Steve

Best single box CD player for the money that I've auditioned is an Arcam CD23 FMJ. It uses the dCS ring dac and sounds spectacular.

Only reason I sold mine, was I bought an external dac, so no need for a fancy CD player, just needed a basic transport with SPDIF output.

Concur. It is tough to beat out those Arcam FMJ cd players.

Hello,

If you would ask me, I would tell you that I had a Wadia 861b CD player. This is a well known and respected player.
After I ripped some CD's to my laptop and connected that to a nice DAC and connected that to my set.. I never even compared or listened to my Wadia anymore. I sold is 2 weeks, for not too much money.
Now I made an open source cics Memory Player, rip my CD's with EAC,and play them with Cplay or Foobar.
The result is so much more details I never heard (and I have a more than decent set up), and so much more music, that I would not advise on any CD player (though I must admit that I did not hear many), but go PC.
Cheaper and probably much better.
And on top of this great sound, there are plenty improvement possible, with help of their enormous forum.
They got best audiophile equipment of the year 2008, by enjoy the music.com. No idea of that is of any value, but still..

Anyone heard of an ADS CD3. Its heavy and built like a tank