DAC for carousel cd player?

I agree a better DAC should make a nice improvement.  I’ve had a Rotel prepro and am familiar with the house sound, so I’d recommend a DAC that’s not too analytical and has a little flesh on the bone as it were or the result may be a little fatiguing.  The Schiit Modius is only $199 and offers a relatively robust sound for a cheaper DAC so may be a good fit with your Rotel and yield significant overall improvements.  Add a decent toslink cable that shouldn’t be very expensive (sorry I’ve no experience with them so no specific recommendation) and you’re good to go.  Best of luck. 

Does the Pioneer have a coax RCA digital output? If so I recommend using that instead of the toslink (plastic) optical output. The best optical digital outputs are glass fiber. Toslink falls short! A 75 ohm 1.5 meter RCA cable will sound much better than a toslink!

Thank you @soix and @jasonbourne52!

I will have to use the toslink to connect the dac to my cd player. I have it narrowed down to the Schiit Modius and the Cambridge Audio DacMagic 100...Can't thank you all enough for your advice and recommendations! Big help, which unit do you think?

I agree that a new inexpensive DAC would make for an improvement. Might look for a used one having the characters soix recommends.  MHDT DACs have this, having a a tube output buffer. Known to be very smooth sounding DACs. 

a used MHDT Istanbul is on sale at audiomart, R2R, tubed great sounding DAC  600.00