How much difference does a CD player make?

[Carl Reid]

...so that's what I did! I was wunnerin'...and silly me I thought an alternative POV for more reasonable expenditure was just what the toaster parade needed...

Toasters? Been watching Battlestar Gallactica again? LOL

To insinuate myself into this thread, I recall some time ago a poster began waxing euphoric over a particular CDP with an astronomical price tag...possibly in excess of $10k...Turns out it used an off-the-shelf, top-load Marantz drive and was housed in a highly poli$hed cha$$i$ and sported a carved billet aluminum face-plate with deep and pronounced engraving...A regular work of industrial art...It's DAC had, as I recall, the ability to provide four distinct tonal outputs...they were not called tone controls (as we all know such things are considered anathema by those of the gilded-pinnae crowd) but by a pseudo-techie name like "environmental compensation" or some such circumlocution...

Now, that's exactly the kind of nonsense I want to avoid doing... dropping a pile of cash on a piece of fancy artwork with an equalizer/tone controls... Might as well just buy a cheap eq or an integrated with tone controls and save myself some cash....