If your whole system costs $40,000....

Would spend no more than $5000.00 new or used. A bigger concern would be tube or solid state player. In my system, which cost half of your proposed system I would be hard pressed to spend more than $2500.00 and it would have to do everything accept walk on water. Even if you decide on computer based music audio components having a good cd player would be always be welcome.

IMO...you can get near state of the art for $4-5K (used)...=~10-15% of total - on a $40K system.

Herman - that you for your input which re-inforces what I said - you added nothing. In fact I did answer the question as about 1/3 was spent on my front end of my system as I tried to keep a pricing balance bewteen all parts. I stayed away from recommmending what player as that is subjective and a personal choice but gave the OP what I was thinking in setting up a system.....aside from price I used a 1/3 third rule and it has worked.

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Quite the contrary. I added that in my considered opinion allocating percentages for each component is a waste of time. Others have agreed and as I pointed out the responses of between 5 and 200% reinforce that idea. I'm happy your 1/3 rule worked for you but evidently you are the only one so far with that arbitrary ratio. The OP seems to like 10% as he first suggested it and then thanked someone for agreeing with him.

It is, in my opinion as well as others, a silly way to build a system. If the OP would take that advise he would be the better for it and I would have indeed added something. Since his mind was evidently made up going in the whole thing has been a waste of time.

take care

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Herman is right, of course.

But I suppose if the op is synthesizing the data properly and everyone is having fun, being right once again doesn't really matter?