Best Sounding CD / SACD player under 15K

Joe, you should add a pre-loved/ex demo Vitus SCD-010 to your list. The SCD-010 is from their Signature series & is one of the best rbcd players in the world. Vitus sounds very analogue & smooth. Resolution is as good as it gets for a rbcd deck, and build quality is extreme.

Joe, I read the K-01 retails for $22k (and that was 12 months ago), so you'd be looking pre-owned, and it's unlikely any examples will come up soon, but it looks like an impressive deck.

03-24-13: Syntax
EMMLabs CDSA-SE
Very interesting unit, right from Tone, excellent Soundstage and it doesn't make you cry while listening. I bought it.

A very impressive cd player indeed Syntax! Emm are not warm & sweet sounding like Ayon however, so for my taste I would want to be running warm amps & cables with a player like the CDSA-SE. That said, I think it would be worth building a system around that player..

Imho, cd drives (no matter how good) are going the way of the dodo and have now been superceded by high res music streamed from servers via AES3 and NAS over ethernet. For example, with proper buffering in the dac, streaming over ethernet does not simply 'tackle' jitter, by it's very nature it eliminates jitter altogether because the clock signal is non-existant and because the transfer method has no bandwidth problems and carries no ground. This means that the digital transmission arrives, is buffered and is converted with no jitter artifacts and no accumulated noise issues. It also means that there are essentially no limitations on the resolution of the digital file itself, at least as far as current file formats are concerned. Not even streaming via AES3 can achieve that since the clock is embedded in the digital audio data stream. Whenever it gets moved, goes through a connector, is exposed to low frequency noise or a million other things, it has the potential to induce or increase jitter.