CD upgrade.

A few relatively low priced ($1,000 US new) current CD/SACD players with digital inputs that many people seem to like are:

Sony SA5400ES (recently discontinued)
Marantz SA8004
Oppo BDP95

Digital inputs allow you access to the DAC inside the player from other sources, such as another transport or a music server. You really should get a player with digital inputs so that it doesn't become obsolete if music servers take over for cd players, which probably will happen one of these years.

The Oppo is a universal player BluRay, SACD, CD, DVD, DVD-A. It's got all the bases covered.

There is probably a lot of opinion on each of these players on the forum. A search will give you lots of reading.

The optical output on your cd player is digital out. It is for sending the digital bits from the Droplet to a different DAC (like the ones in the players above). I think optical is going out of style as a digital connection. I don't think that the players I mentioned above have an optical digital input, but I could be wrong.

Hope this helps.

P.S. You may find with the newer players that cd sound has improved enough that you don't need the tubes to take the edge off the sound. There are still prenty of good tubed players around though

I mean ditch the spinning disc totally. Ripping your CDs in with DbPoweramp as FLAC (24/96 or higher), and playing through a DAC (with an iPad), will result in better sound. I am using a LINN Akurate DS with an iPad and 24/192 WAV files. You would be hard pressed to find a CD player under $10k that would beat this sound.

Audio freak, thanks for the pointers, and thank you tomcy6.i appreciate the responses. And thanks to others too.

is the linn akurate ds very expensive? my budget is around 3k pounds ( British pounds).

During research i came across a product - Olive music servers.
anyone have experience with this kind of product? their claims are very high.

it does seem cd might be phasing out in years to come.

Thanks.

I just read that Olive claims 250 times the resolution of cd!
How can this be possible when surely there is no music file with 250 times the data that is present on a commercial cd let alone a flac or mp3, direct or burnt to an audio cdr? am i missing something here? Seems like high claim that has no truth in it whatsoever , designed to make sales? am i wrong?
Thank you kindly