Okay......best single box reference CD player


I currently own a CEC TL-1 transport, along with a dcs Delius and Purcell upsampler.....what one box CD player out there can deliver dynamics, transpareny, smoothness and inner detail that will outperform my current set up. Meridian 808....???? Please let me know your thoughts....
garebear
Stringbean,
Let me address two issues.

First, if you canvas 10 folks with really high end systems (I mean high end, not stuff like yours) and ask which one box cd player they prefer, none will say Ayre. You'll hear Esoteric, EMM, AMR, etc.

Point two, getting "booed" by some amateur analogists is not a big deal.

Thank you.
Audiofeil said:
"I could care less about being booed; it's still better than being you."

I'm amazed, disgusted, and saddened by this comment.
I think that the old DACs have a place, particularly for a company like Naim that's not staking their whole reputation on the performance of their CDP. They want to be considered top echelon in everything that they do, but not necessarily the very best. They might sacrifice the last bit of performance to be able to be "in the running" and reliable, consistant with their brand.

Contrast that with a designer that can build a custom DAC that may do one or two things much better than any off-the-shelf DAC, current or past. That's a much riskier strategy, particularly for a big company, but for a designer with the particular experience needed, that could be a huge advantage.

On the risk side, lots of these custom DACs in the past might have issues with playing all formats of CDs, or the transport drawer would do odd things at the worst times. So, it takes an experienced designer that really thinks of all the possible failure issues and addresses them. Add with a really solid transport in a solid chassis and you get into high potential. That gets expensive and high expense most often converts to low volumes, etc., etc.

Naim, Cambridge, PS and others make good digital products at their various price points, but none of those are purely digital companies. I'm not saying that a full-line manufacturer can't make a top-of-the-heap CDP, but the odds that a single designer or small group of like minded designers can do something better is high, particularly now that the digital technology has started to mature.

Dave
Stringreen
I've heard Ayre and it's a very good player but not even close to dCS Puccini and Emmlabs cdsa se. And I guess in PD if the designer pushed further his previous design.\

And the title of this thread is "best single box reference cd player" so I guess that's why it was not mentioned before.