Hmm, how much is that Lavry?...plus the separate player/transport, plus another digital interconnect, plus another power cord, plus another shelf space taken up, plus another outlet taken up on the power conditioner...And all that just at the same time many audiophiles are adding various new boxes in the form of digital recorders/ADCs/servers/wireless hubs...I think a bit of consolidation begins to make sense for a lot of audiophiles.
If one box can handle all the silver disk formats for playback and serve as the audiophile DAC of the bunch for multiple sampling rates, that seems helpful. What increasingly doesn't make a lot of sense anymore is to have a separate box serving solely as a Red Book transport or player when you have these other sources you'd like to incorporate, in many cases with upgraded external analog conversion if possible. Since most audiophiles still have reasons for not going with preamps that are also DACs (and therefore there aren't and won't be too many of those on the market), and most traditional high end digital firms seem to be slow to move in the direction of the emerging music-server/network-enabled paradigm, the audiophile disk player seems the most logical and also easiest candidate to expand its duties within the traditional high end system context.
Several high end firms have already gone this route with their CDPs (while many still haven't), and many more have come out with so-called universal players that are capabable of handling multiple sampling rates yet still lack input facilities, but more audiophile companies need to integrate those two approaches, with the option of omitting video and multi-channel capabilities to keep it all relatively afforable and focused on the traditional high end 2-channel system and software, which it's clear ain't going away anytime soon.
