Best CD sound: Marantz SA8001 or Rega Apollo?

Daltonlanny,
I don't know why but very few people have anything to say about the 8001. I posted something about the 8001 about a year ago...again it was very very little (i'll just assume not many have it).

ANyway I bought one last September I think it was. I liked the 8001. I bought it to replace an SA8260, that to me was nice and warm, good sounding for the money, but I wanted to try the new one. The 8001 is far more transparent and open than the 8260. I really have nothing bad to say about it at all. FOr the money its probably one of the best, if not the best. To have SACD added, is a real bonus, and for that reason I skipped the Rega. I don't have anything to add about the compare/contrast to the Rega as i have no exp with the apollo. Anyway I wish Stereophile would do something like sub 1000 players shootout. That would be very useful.
I have since moved on the NAD M5 CD/SACD player. I really like this player, but its 2x the price. Is it 2x as good (I have no idea on how one could measure such a thing)? Probably not, but therein lies the rub.

I'd check out the PC audio forum and not waste you money on a cd player. For some reason the magazines aren't letting on that cd players just stink compared to a computer based system. The analogy I've heard is that you need to spend 20k to better them. To get you started spend your 1k on a dac, then buy a $29 cyberhome dvd player to use as a transport with a stereovox/idigital digital cable. I am sure better transports are out there but all of them will suffer from jitter. Believe it or not, and I never would have without hearing and experimenting, but PC audio made digital not just tolerable, but involving for me for the first time. I set my father ( audiophile for 25 years) up with an ancient (meaning I was going to give it away) imac with a large firewire hard drive and he will never go back to vinyl.

4est
That is plain poo poo. The NAD M5 SACD outs sounded better than my Squeezebox driving a late model Benchmark DAC1. Not to my ears alone but the the DAC 1s owner as well as another dudes. On redbook it was much closer and would really require days to evaluate.

BTW my squeezebox has a massively upgrade power supply.

Of course the convenience of the SB3 is unbeatable, but you need a really great DAC to "blow away" a GOOD cdp.

And not to beat a dead horse, but the Benchmark people claim to have proved that their DAC can correct for any timing problems coming from the source. In other words, they claim it makes no difference whether you feed it from a CD transport or from a computer. Again, this is something that could easily be verified. If it's true for the Benchmark DAC, there's not reason it couldn't be true for the DAC in a CD player.

I'm responding to 4est.

I think you're being a bit extreme. I used a borrowed Benchmark DAC with my computer audio files and was quite pleased with the sound. But I'm not sure that it bettered the SA 8001, which costs slightly less. (The Benchmark definitely has a better headphone amp, though, than the headphone output of the Marantz.)

This is the sort of thing, by the way, where it would be very easy, and I think helpful, to do some blind testing. Many CD players have a DAC input, so one could compare the sound of a CD in the player with the sound of the same recording playing back from a computer into the DAC. If retrieving data from a CD in real time is really such a problem, it should be audible.