Your Three Most Loved Digital Sources

[jandl100]

#3: Consonance Forbidden City Orfeo.
Wonderful organic sound from this very reasonably priced CDP.

Mmmmm, yummy ... that's just how I imagined it would sound! A friend of mine has a Consonance Droplet CDP - gorgeous! Must admit that a Consonance CDP is on my Want List.

[roob]

Jerry
What happened to the DPA dac?

[WAD62]

At about £90 the SB receiver is hard to beat for value and performance, particularly when paired with SqueezeCommander on an android phone (about £3)

[jandl100]

Jerry
What happened to the DPA dac?

Yep, that was good ... but ...

... Jake / lordmortlock of this parish came around to my place with his Marantz KI Pearl CDP. That was just a hifi blockbuster with little or no musical involvement, but it showed up some deficiencies in the bass end of the DPA. (By gum, that Marantz had phenomenal bass depth and slam!). I stewed in that for a while, then Jake sold the Marantz and bought my DPA DAC! Funny old world, innit!

... I then tried the MHZS CD88 and have fallen madly deeply in love with it.

[bobbasrah]

At my more budget end of it:
1 - Creative Zen 32Gb - Coupled with Sennheiser Buds, it actually made mp3's sound musical and look organised before FLAC players began to appear.
2 - Musiland 02US - My first experience of what CD and DVD players failed to deliver:XP pumping FLAC on Foobar with Asio enabled via USB to the Musiland to the big Pioneer to the Beyers. The RCA out from the 02US was raspy, but later as a transport to a DAC/AMP on digital, nice step.
3- Not sure if this counts strictly, but new computer with 2 separate internal USB hubs (one dedicated to the 02US) + Win7/Wasapi and Mediaportal/PureAudio Plugin made it a joy to use. Roll on MP2....

Of course that is the 3 faves only until the next idea comes along for a DIY upgrade project.

[griffo104]

My current two digital sources.

Audio Analogue Maestro MKII. 20kg of Italian sweetness, made me want to listen to CD again after vinyl took over my life. The drawer is horrible on it but once in the CD sounds very sweet, switchable sampling rate and also has an input to use the DAC, which also sounds very good in it's own right.

Denon DVD2900. Great build quality, decent cd player, very good SACD and it also plays films very well - perfect universal player. Does a very good job as a transport as well, recently been playing with it going in to the AA Maestro DAC and it does a very good job indeed.

Doubt I'll ever buy another CD player, chances are I would get a cheap blu-ray for a transport to make use of the AA dac or alternatively I'll go the computer way and still make use of the AA dac. No changes to the digital front ends until something dies.

I do enjoy my players but I find the gap in digital quality very small compared to vinyl and I'd much rather listen to that given the choice.

Having heard an £8.5k Nagra CD player in my system it was better but not £8k better than I paid for the AA player.