[quote user="ifitsoundsgoodlistentoit"]without trying to start an arguement... if this is true then why doesnt everyone sell their CDPs so they can buy a cheap 50 quid CDP to feed a Chord DAC64 or similar? seems a little strange to me that so many people are still willing to part with a large amount of cash for a CDP when all they need is a cheap transport and high quality DAC...?[/quote]
I dont think you are to far wrong there though there's the argument I've mentioned before re. reading-speed accuracy/error correction. Dont forget, not everyone wants two boxes and the associated choice of cabling and not everyone wants to spend a lot of money on cdp with or without external dac. As to why they make expensive players, the upsampling technology and often complex output stages are not cheap and you do normally pay for quality. Having said that, a lot of players across the board use similar technology and the gap between what a relatively cheap one sounds compared to one hundreds of pounds further up the scale has definitively closed over the last few years. Whether I like them or not, its amazing what CA is capable of doing with their Anagram technology upsamplers, not many years ago this would have been the ultra high end of things. There's an argument that red book cd transports sound better than DVD-CD-ROM drives with associated spif cabling though I'm really not an expert and can't quite see why that would be apart from quicker reading times of the former