hi fi newbie:As mentioned this exercise of connecting the cd player to the dac is fairly pointless. If you are not going to be using the dac for lossless files, then I would just stick with the cd player.
No, it is not pointless. When you're using an external DAC with a CD player your are effectively swapping DAC (bypassing the internal one). If your external DAC is of higher quality than the one built into the CD player you will get better results.
Also, I see people sometimes talk in general terms about 'lossless files', not considering where they originally came from. If ripped from a CD using the computer built-in CD player, stored on hard drive (in a lossless format) and then streamed to a DAC, vs streaming from a CD player to DAC directly, the comparison is between the computer's CD drive and the ripping software against the the stand-alone CD player's transport. There is a lot of CD-ripping software out there which will give rubbish results. There is also software that applies clever tricks to try and read the CD with minimum error, for example re-reading the same sectors several times and compare for differences. So I suspect that by coupling a decent CD drive with good software, the data reproduction will be comparable if not better than the best stand-alone CD transports out there, so to that note I agree with you.
Not to mention higher quality audio files which wouldn't physically be possible to represent on a CD, of course (higher bit rates, higher sampling frequencies)...