CD Player Recommendations…

CD players with chips from Texas Instruments, Burr Brown, Wolfson, and in-house are some of the best.

Each CD player will have different sonic benefits. Detail retrieval, bass accuracy, midrange transparency, and treble resolution can translate differently on any number of CD players. Along with this, transient response is important. If your CD player sounds "slower" on certain songs and "very fast" on others, it's doing something right.

Most DACs would gloss over timing irregularities - unless they were high-end.

My suggestion would be going for a CD player that  was designed with the intent of reproducing the original sound. A component like this will challenge the rest of your set up. You will know if it's time for an upgrade after that.

Just search for "designed with the intent of reproducing the original sound"

@fuzztone

Have you not heard of the terms "reference" or reference-grade?" 

lol I should have just said above...my bad.

jsbach1685 OP
Thanks George for the link.

If your going CD only as the title says, look carefully at the conversion process.

For CD Redbook replay (which is PCM) 16/44 24/96 or DXD, the only dac process that convert it "bit perfect" are your "R2R Multibit" dac chips or the new discrete R2R multibit ones, (which don’t come in one box cd players that I’ve seen, only dacs)

All other "Delta Sigma" dac chip conversion processes (1bit, single bit, bitstream, ess, wofson, etc etc ) can only give a "facsimile" of PCM it can never be "bit perfect" like R2R, but they do do online streaming sacd, dsd, if your into it. (I’m not, too much compressed re-issues from them)

Cheers George

Marantz