upgrade player or use modified oppo bdp 105 as transport

Here’s a nice Denafrips Terminator 2 that’s in your price range and should provide significant improvements in all areas…

https://www.usaudiomart.com/details/649931645-denafrips-terminator-ii-12th-black-full-warranty-free-ship-mint-1010-just-received-it-brand-new/

If you can squeeze it into your budget I’d also highly recommend adding a DDC like this Musician Leo that’ll both re-clock and allow you to run an i2S connection into your DAC…

https://aoshida-audio.com/products/musician-leo

Heres a review of another Terminator version and their highest Gaia DDC that I think does a nice job describing the attributes you can expect. I recently added a DDC and i2S into my Musician Pegasus DAC and the improvements were immediately obvious and very much inline with what this reviewer found.
https://soundnews.net/sources/dacs/denafrips-terminator-plus-r-2r-dac-gaia-ddc-review-born-to-be-wild/

 Hope this helps, and best of luck.

Soix, thank you for the links. Great read exposing just how little I know about digital audio. Much more to lear/research.

+1 or the Audiolab 6000CDT, but check out the Pro-ject player, which Im told sounds excellent, has the important innards to its big brother transport, but has coax outs to connect to your dac of choice

Thanks all for the responses. I have been pouring over several forums here and realize I'd like to upgrade for the "last" time (LOL) and do it right the first time. Based on many  A-goner's inputs (and others) I find myself lusting for something like the PS Audio Direct Stream MK2 DAC coupled with the relatively new Perfect Wave SACD transport (supports CD too but not HDCD). (add streaming later)  Obviously price is the big stumbling block. Really like the reviews and testimonials for the Holo May dac (spelling) and the Denafrips Terminator II dac.  Both are nearly as pricey as the Direct Stream, but I'm thinking synergy might come into play here as I'm not finding a lot of choices for stellar SACD/CD transports. Not sure I can wait for these goodies to turn up on the used market...but 15K + is probably too rich for my situation.  Finding that while our passion for 2 channel audio is a very niche market, there seem to be countless choices for gear and opinions out there with no real set standards and the like. So much to wade through, like I just sat and watched the audio world morph into an uber complicated pass time. Still looking for potential "giant killers". Love to "hear" what others think.

Happy Listening 

There are two PS Audio Units currently listed on Agon- perfect wave dac and SACD player at roughly $8.5K for both. You shouldn’t have to wait long to find these on the used market- there is a lot of it out there!