CD PLAYER

Esoteric P/D02.

Find Fcrowder; he made the leap from the EMM to the Esoteric.

Depending on what you do not like about your unit the Ayon CD5s may be worth an audition - Rock solid reliable and really refined yet exciting sound. I preferred to the Meridian 808.3

I would look at reliabilty. And that means players outside of the ultra high-end. Marantz, NAD, Yamaha, Oppo etc... All CD players will break sooner or later. Why invest a lot.
Cheers

It might help to understand what you feel is deficient in this setup. I thought the XDS1 was extremely resolving and the most neutral DAC I had. It does help pairing it with a tube preamp like an Audio Research Reference 5/5SE that I am using now.

The next step up from EMM is the two box combo: TSDX/DAC2X which 3 of my friends have upgraded to. Separating the power between the transport and the DAC is supposed to improve the performance significantly.

I hear the Audio Note Fifth Element with separate DAC and power supply sounds nice and one can usually pick it up for only about $200,000.00 and have a few bucks left for some CD's.