Okay......best single box reference CD player

You're right Kops. As you said, that is the title of the thread.

There are a dozen players an experienced audiophile would select before the Ayre as the "best one box player".

Concur, Ayre digital is certainly not up to the standards of their amplification.

The only player mentioned here that I've heard myself is the DCS Puccini, which sounded very good. I've heard other high end players at dealers and all sound different, but I can't say one is necessarily better or not based on my limited exposure.

I'm really trying to understand what it is that makes one CD player in this league better than the other. Are there any that are truly better in ALL aspects, not just those that appeal to a certain listener?

It would help if some objective details were provided to help justify claims that any particular box, Ayre, DCS, PD, whatever, is superior, as in my mind, this should be the case to justify the cost of these players.

In the end, I am still convinced that personal taste is the prime determining factor in many cases.

Measureable objective evidence can be tough to come by when we're talking about the nth degree. Playback Designs reports absolute zero jitter, but until a third party like Stereophile validates it, that's just a report. Owners of Emm report that upgrading the transport improves the overall sound by bringing the mids and bass more forward, but no one can measure anything different, at least so far as I can find.

Why do certain components improve a lot with burn-in? Jeff Rowland told some of us on a tour of his place that he hears the improvement with burn-in but has been unable to measure it. He theorizes that it's due to the dielectrics settling into a a charge, but he can't "prove" it.

I think that the very top players that I've heard are very close in sound and the differences come down to small degrees of transparency and small differences in the emphasis of various aspects of the spectral presentation with more details available in different regions of the EQ that are unmeasureable. All of these top players have eliminated digital glaze from the equation; therefore, they're all pleasant to live with and have you roaring through your CD collection to re-hear everything that you missed before, but there are still very slight differences in other areas that distinguish one from the other and provide us with all this entertaining discussion.

Dave

Agree with Bar81 on Ayre amps.

Killer products; among the best solid state gear available.