Absolute Best CD Players Out There Under $12k ?

I own the Meitner gear and very happy with it. All of the above are great players with different personalities and already a lot of comments done. Among them Meitner/Reimyo/dcS are generally similiar in quality (well by that I mean cutting age digital), clearly a cut above the rest, but with different characters and a matter of personal taste: the one thing Reimyo can't do is play SACDs which is factor to consider. If you want to consider price as factor, the new Ayre universal player is extremely good and I would recommend auditioning it against the Esoteric gear. I plan to do so next year as I move into another house and build a second system: perhaps the dcs new one box player will come into play but it is 50-100% more expensive than the other two: hopefully they will be cutting prices? Yeah, right.

Sure thing Judy. . . no prob. As soon as you reciprocate, of course. . . and watch that helico-bacterium pilori. . . truly nasty stuff it can be! It can do a real number on your gastric pH. On the other hand riding a halcyonic platform might help. . . the Mythical Halcyon, in the shape of the Kingfisher, had in antiquity the power even to calm the winds and the waves of the Kraken. . . . or so I am told. . . that was before my time.

FWIW, Judy's post strikes me as having a cruel undertone, e.g. "...ad nauseum...", "...always the greatest thing...", etc. Norm is one of the very few people I know of who is almost constantly trying new, cutting edge components. And I gather from reading his posts over time that he is not always posting about just "His latest acquisition...", i.e. I believe that he tries many things that he does NOT like that much (and that he doesn't post about). When he does post something positive, I always think that OF COURSE it's because it's the best he's heard! (isn't that largely true of all of us, the only difference being the amazing volume of equipment that Norm hears in a year?). Seems to me there's a HECK of a lot more benefit in what he has to say (and introduce us to) than there is downside. And, OF COURSE, one should take what he says with a grain of salt. I take what ANYone says about audio components with a grain of salt.

Having heard the dCS stack, the EMM Labs gear, the Wadia 27/270 and the Linn, I would choose the EMM from those choices principally because it does SACD and I like SACD far more than redbook. If it were just redbook, though, I'd go with the Linn, it isn't the most detailed or revealing but it just sounds "right" to me--the others are a little too analytical for my taste (Meitner's sound surprised me, quite the opposite of what I would have expected given his early CD3 CD player, still one of my old favorites). And I'd choose (and have chosen) my Forsell/Audio Logic combination over all of them, but I am admittedly an unabashed fan of those pieces, as my posts will attest, so take that for what it's worth.

Jfz, I concur 100% about Norm. I'd like to know everthing he's forgotten in this hobby.