What makes certain cd players better than others?

Krazeeyk, you are pretty much correct about the process you're about to be going through. But don't feel badly - trial and error is a continual experience for audiophiles with a lot more years and gear under their belts than you. I'm not going to try to tell you what to listen for; that wasn't my intent in bringing that up - rather merely to say that even if respondents made a laundry list of sonic attributes, that wouldn't be any more helpful than a list of design features, or paper specs as you put it. You've just got to start somewhere, and keep listening. Besides, you really can't start right from the beginning with your ultimate system, or even one for a price, without experiencing some different stuff in between through an upgrading process, especially if you're not auditioning beforehand. And I admire you for not wanting to waste the time of dealers if you have no intention of buying from them. You're correct about using Audiogon to minimize your financial risk in trying stuff out in your home.

Anyway, to get back to your questions, I don't know about digital being simplicity (that more describes analog), but I can say that specs and chips and design features aren't necessarily going to tell you much about what a player will sound like. I can also tell you that digital differences can be pretty subtle, compared to speakers or amplifiers (though they don't have to be), and that you probably can't go way far wrong in choosing from among the various moderately-priced options in your range - none will sound like the best, but none should ruin your sound either My best advice would be to try and stick with well-known makers and pretty up-to-date models, just as a hedge if you decide to sell again. I'm sorry I can't comment on the specific model you're talking about getting, but maybe others can. Best of luck and happy listening!

Krazeeyk,

I will try and shedd some light on a few topics..

Physical layout:

The PC board layout has a huge impact. Think of the board layout for a CD player as a 3 bedroom house floorplan one room for the digital components one for the analog one for the power supply ect... The reason the PCB is split into 3 rooms (or atleast should be)is to isolate noise from the Analog section.. (think analog clean and pwr supply/digital dirty). Usually what will happen is the D to A converters will bridge the analog and digital sections of the PCB because the converters need an analog pwr/gnd and digital pwr/gnd and we want to keep those pwr/gnd's seperated as much as possible but eventually they will need to tie together. Typically for a "quality design" the PCB will have atleast 4 layers. There are exceptions but not many.

That is a very general explanation... The difference bettween a good PCB layout and a bad one is how someone
goes about doing what i explaned. Most chip manufactures will give some physical guidlines for implementing their chips... (that someone has spent alot of time on figuring out) and a good engineer will take that info into consideration. A good engineer will have the ability to translate whats on the spec sheets and his schematic into a Physical layout that takes into consideration whats going to take place on the PCB.

Component selection:

Simple... without quality components you dont get hi-fi.
The better the components and implementation the better
the results. I think someone else mentioned the output
stage and the guys doing tweaks.. What they are doing is
"upgrading" the components. But if its a bad PCB layout
(poor grounding, poor component placement, poor trace routing.. ect.) the product still wont be what it should.

Jitter:

Jitter is a timing problem between digital domains. Think of it as you trying to syncronize your wrist watch to the
clock on the wall that keeps changing (i cant think of another analogy right now). Jitter can be caused by many things including Crappy cables, Pwr supply noise ect... With many outboard DAC's what they will do is take the signal and re-clock it and get the jitter out as well as upsampling ect.. A good CD player will have been designed for minimal jitter in the first place. Jitter is a killer
in any digital domain but where it really hurts is in our
beloved hi-fi equipment because we hear it...

Those are a few areas that will differentiate a good CD
from a bad one...

Hope that helps.

Took a peek to see what direction this thread headed towards, and the "trust your ears" is always sound advice (pun intended). I posted some pseudo-technical stuff as a response because ALL good sounding CDP's take these things into account. I'm a geek and a tweak, love to pop the hood and see what's what in gear. Partly due to my job, I've been in the semiconductor business for 20 years. Bottom line, if the designer ignores these fundamental issues your ears will bleed.

I was one of the unfortunate souls that bought a CD player when there were two titles available, and have upgraded many many times over the years. The advance in digital has been obvious but sadly still comes nowhere near vinyl for musical enjoyment.