You could go with a DAC and a Sony Mega changer. That is what I do. my DSP has one of those upsampling 192KHz DACs with all the bells and whistles. I just feed the megachanger toslink to the DSP in my case. I don't have great ears though and I can't say that the DSP DAC is a big improvement over the Sony analog out. (The latest delta-sigma DACs seem pretty good to me in most recent Sony players today).
Anyway this gives me XLR output from the DSP. The BEL Canto mentioned above is probably better than what I have and it also has XLR. Stereophile raved about it - but they rave about nearly anything new. I'd trust this audiogon reviewer before trusting Stereophile...
Steve Nugent makes a pace car reclocker that you may want to investigate.I have no personal experience but other people here love them. Sony's jitter is of the order of 1 nsec...which is supposed to be inaudible at least that is what I think (of course it all depends critically on WHAT kind of jitter - correlated or random with random much better) but a reclocker or a good DAC with a good modern PLL might get you down to 200 psec (which is for sure better than the Sony)
Anyway this gives me XLR output from the DSP. The BEL Canto mentioned above is probably better than what I have and it also has XLR. Stereophile raved about it - but they rave about nearly anything new. I'd trust this audiogon reviewer before trusting Stereophile...
Steve Nugent makes a pace car reclocker that you may want to investigate.I have no personal experience but other people here love them. Sony's jitter is of the order of 1 nsec...which is supposed to be inaudible at least that is what I think (of course it all depends critically on WHAT kind of jitter - correlated or random with random much better) but a reclocker or a good DAC with a good modern PLL might get you down to 200 psec (which is for sure better than the Sony)