The advice is always to buy to taste, but really, I'd be looking at a wireless reciever these days. Having the dac on board is by far the best solution, because any unneccessary analogue stages are in a relative sense a disaster in terms of fidelity. It is totes possible you'd prefer the bias introduced by the DAC/output stage on a particular CD player, or preamp. And hey, yep, although I recognise ripped CDs and web FLACs are bit for bit the same thing as the disc, I do indeed miss sticking the discs in the drive. Anyway you lot are well old. I mean, old school. The neural pathways and learned behaviour will be as stubborn as it gets.... no point trying to force the.. uhh... 'best' solution down your own throat, when your brain will surely want what it wants, and will thus make sure nothing on this earth proves that it might have been wasting it's time on fallacies that only served as indirect self-flattery. (Like 'reclocking' cd players to address jitter that is many orders of magnitude less than can be percieved *cough* *whistle*).
