No apologies friend! Its a huge space you are traversing moving form ARR CDs to the Linn & Esoteric recordings.
Now heres my take after about 10 yrs toying between dedicated transports to universal players. Given the way the technology has evolved over the last few years, I personally think that the CDP's are at a great risk of being pushed to the periphery.
A bit of this happened when good quality universals came out such as the Oppo, Pioneer Elite & Denon (early generation) universal players. speaking to someone who has a business in the AV industry, I was surprised to see that their inventory was close to about 60% fo what it used to be even 5 yrs ago.
Now with BluRay & other HD media sources, this will be further hit.
It is a bit hard to digest this but one has to wake up to the times and embrace the changes in technology.
why this long post...my preference is to go for a universal player like the Oppo 980 or a Pioneer Elite 59 avi if you want music (sounds like) and still good video capabilities.
If you want to be old school and get slightly better audio performance, then go for a dedicated CDP. If you want to look for future proofing, PS3 (plays CDs, DVDs, SACD in addiiton to the newer HD formats) is the way to go.
To digress a bit -
Recently I came back from a few weeks on the the road and had a chance to listen to some very good quality players (Linn, Meridian, Mark Levinson, Theta ...) as well as BR players (Pio Elite 05FD, Sony S350 and PS3) for CD, concert DVDs & high res music. This was done over 2.5 days with lengthy sessions. I have to say it for good quality recordings, the PS3 delivers to about 95% of the Pio Elite for music and to about 85-90 of the Theta & Levinsons. (subjective results ofcourse)
Setup was :
Speakers : JM labs Micro Utopia, Rega R3, & PSB Synchrony 1 B.
Integrateds : Arcam FMJ A38, Simaudio Moon i3
Music : Lee Aaron, Ana Caram, Babatunde Olatunji, Dire Straits, Ray Charles, Clark Terry & Solomon Burke
This should give you an idea of how the new players are making out and hopefully help in your decision making.
marsilians,
absolutely, sorry if earlier post failed to give you some info.....speakers are B&W 603 S3 (LFE will be PSB subwoofer) connected by Straightwire 14 gauge cables. I use Van De Hul interconnects to connect the player and receiver. Power source is Marantz SR8500 (125w x 7 channels 8 ohms all channel driven; with current feedback circuit). Although not state of the art, it's decent souding system.
CDs - mostly A.R. Rahman (tamil) collections, westen classical (symphonic) - started moving to Linn & esoteric records for their stellar recording quality.