Quote Originally Posted by htfan14
... Maybe you could tell me why my cd's sound better in my Toshiba SD-5700 then my Sony 275 cd changer? Or why it sounds even better on a Denon 2900 dvd player? All with equal source, denon 3802 and same speakers.
Could you elaborate on this point???
If you're getting significantly different - or even merely detectable differences between 3 different players, that tells me that you're using the DACs within the players themselves and not feeding digital signals to the Denon A/V receiver for D-to-A conversion ... correct?

That is not what the original poster - vansonrider is doing. He's feeding digital signals into his Anthem pre-pro for the D-to-A conversion, which means that he's using his $200 Sony CD changer as just a transport. In this case, the Sony is contributing nearly zilch to the recreation of sound. It's only reading the 1s and the 0s from the disc and sending those to the Denon receiver for conversion to analog signals. It is the DAC within said receiver that's actually recreating the sounds that were recorded on the CD - the Sony changer has just about nothing to do with it. Replacing it with a "high-end" CD player in the exact same setup will change virtually nothing about the sound being recreated.

If my assumption that you're using the DACs within the 3 players and feeding analog signals to your receiver is NOT correct, then I'd say that the differences in sound that you're hearing are much more likely to be imaginary rather than real. There are other possibilities, such as laser pickups that are dirty or not functioning at an optimum level, or defective interconnects (which is a humongous "stretch" since digital interconnects usually either work or they don't - very seldom anything in between).

Does that clear things up for you better?