What is needed to have the best CD/Digital sound?

I'm going to add that no state of the art CD player I have owned has sounded warm and rich. They have sounded "real" and "live" with tremendous extension at both ends of the frequency spectrum, but I'm not sure that is going to get you where you want to go based on the description in your original post. Certainly tubes are going to help. However, I have heard terrific CD players like the Marantz SA-14 and Electrocompaniet EMC 1-UP that in their stock form I'd consider full, warm and rich, but once you modifiy them to squeeze out the last ounce of performance they lose their warmth. This is something to consider. These players can be found at very reasonable prices these days.

Either entire system under heavy mains correction or the whole system off the main and on many many batteries!!!

I secound the Monarchy DIP it also put out a signal up to 5 times stronger + and if you don't want the upsampling to 96 it can be switched to 48kz.

I generally agree with Tvad & Clio09. CDP/DAC is not the optimal place to get a "full, warmth, rich sound."

These are euphonic colorations that are not in the digital source but will come with your preamp and amp.

I am firmly on the fence when it comes to which sound I like best: rich and warm (euphonic) or detailed and wide open (accurate)--please, no arguments about the characterization or semantics; I am having enough debate with myself as it is.

So I use the most accurate CDP/DAC I can afford and switch my preamp/amp between tube and solid state depending on my mood. This way I can have my cake and eat it too. Remember, you can color the sound of your source downstream but you cannot take the color out.

What can it be about tubes and vinyl that adds warmth and richness except distortion? I concede that the quantization process and the conversion back to the analog domain can be flawed in a number of ways, but this is an area of understood signal processing. Done correctly, isn't digitization of the acoustic information more likely to capture an accurate representation of that information?

db