I bought an Arcam CD72T used a while back after I loaned my 5 year old $270 Yamaha CD player to my parents. In all honesty I can't say I heard any difference worth preaching about. When I got the Yammie back, I did a few head to heads with George Winston's "Autumn" and Sarah Brightman's "Time to Say Goodbye" (the only 2 cd's the woman and I both had when she moved in).
I think the Arcam sounded a bit better, but I'll leave this open to the possibility I imagined it, because the Arcam certainly didn't sound 3 times better despite its retail price being 3 times as much.
That said, features and build quality do make it an obviously better CD player, but I don't think I'd buy it brand new. For the price difference there are far better resource allocation decisions to be made. I haven't even bothered testing it head to head against my DVD player, maybe I'll try that this evening.

On the flip side, for 2-channel audio, I do like my Rotel RA-1070 integrated amp a heckuva lot better than my RX-V1400. The sound difference is quite noticeable. I'm not sure if this is a result of the quality of the amplifiers or the difference in the pre-amp sections of the two units or what.

I'd agree with mtrycraft though, your speakers and room acoustics will probably have more impact on overall sound quality than your choice of CD player. Invest wisely.