My head hurts....

I have tried many players as well as having vinyl when I was much younger and am very happy with my cdp and can listen for hours.
Good luck in your search.
Regards,
Bob

Funny... My digital front end makes my headache go away.

There's some pretty sounding digital out there, buys (and I'm a vinyl guy).

The future is in digital servers.

Keep the CD player and take a look at the Roku Soundbridge to broaden your variety of music available. If you have a high speed Internet connection, you can use it to play countless very decent sounding Internet radio stations right out of the can.

If you have a PC and a wireless or wired network at home, you can rip your disks to a loss less file format on disk and start to experiment with a music server.

You can feed a DAC or other digital processors from the Roku to upgrade the sound quality as well if desired.

If you get another CD, make sure it has digital outputs and inputs so you might use it as a transport or DAC alone down the road as well if desired.

If you like your present player, there's no need to upgrade because of unhappiness with the present sound. It seems that your motivation is to explore. Waiting and seeing what will happen is not a good alternative because things always change and you will waiting forever. In my view, the great new frontier is computer based audio. That's where I would suggest you start educating yourself and exploring.

Thanks to all who have provided their comments thus far

I agree now is the time to dive into computer audio should I still keep my cdp as a transport or use a pc/mac instead