Ruminations On CD Players

Marantz has always made excellent CD players. Look into a model under S1K.

I have Schiit Gungnir Dac paired with Cambridge DAc using Marigo apparition dig Cable this is a good combo for less than 2k. You can get Yamaha s1000 cdp with sacd  and transport capability  Iam using Denafrips Ares DAC And Kimber d60 digital cable. Good combo as well.for less than 2 k. You have Dac , transport and cdp.

OP don’t buy used CD player because lasers died in 10 yrs most of them. I don’t know about transport.Music direct has good sale of Ruby Marantz sometimes but it’s more than 2 k.

John, just food for thought for the present or future if you do go down the separates route. Transports are not all the same SQ wise and will either hold back or release the potential of the DAC. Benjamin Zwickel, Mojo Audio DACs, clued me into this when I was purchasing one of his ,and he was correct. I went from Cambridge CXC to Simaudio DT 260 and the SQ materially improved. Check out the threads on the top Project transport or the Jay’s transports and you will find similar experiences. Also, when you go beyond the likes of the Cambridge or Audio Lab transports one of the digital output connections might be optimized for SQ so you may want to have a DAC that accepts that connection. I initially used the SPDIF on the Simaudio and it sounded very good. However, out of curiosity I asked Simaudio if one of the connections was optimized for SQ and was told the AES/EBU was. The result was a further uptick in SQ. I believe the top of the line Project is optimized likewise, though folks using the SPDIF connection appear to be very pleased with its SQ. I don’t know if either of the Jay’s transports have an optimized output. Again, just some things to possibly consider.

I also need to track down the source of a mid-range screech, which I'll address in a future post.

Eeeek!  That sure don’t sound good.  Is that present with both vinyl and CDs?  I noticed your amp only puts out 36 Wpc in ultra linear mode (and obviously much less in triode) and recall the Totems tend to require some power, so I’d be a little concerned your amp may be straining to power your speakers and might be a source of what you’re hearing.  But this is just a semi-educated guess so just chalk it up as food for thought.