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

I will never own a disc player again. I think they have lost their relevance. The DAC was always the most important part of the player anyway, and now a stand alone DAC is much more important than the machine that spins it.

Download the info to a music server, then let the DAC take it from there.

Well Said Macdadtexas. You are absolutely right. Yours is the sensible answer. Players will go the way of VCR's...

Forget CD players. Rip your collection to harddisc and get a good USB Dac or a USB to S/PDIF converter and DAC. You can achieve SQ of very high grade CD players this way, and the convience is unsurpasses. Ripping the CD's is the real bitch though...

Well Shardone, go comment on my newest thread about disc players, need some back up

Interesting comments. I agree with some of the above cost is not a good way to qualify a disk player. You should listen to one model and listen to the one above it and see if you can hear more detail or soundstage etc preferably in your system. That is the only really way to tell.

As far as all this talk of disk players going away I don't see it anytime soon on high end audio. The Dax is important but there is not a pc yet that can feed it and make it sound as good as my cd player. I have tried all sorts of dacs and sources but I have not tried the new Mach2music just to be fair. What is neat is my wadia will take a USB and has a cd player built in. Anyhow listening is the only way to find one that will match your system. If you need a number I find I need to spend about 6k to get the detail I want in a player.