Bel Canto vs. Musical Fidelity

The Meridian DAC would be another one to check out. Also, the Sony CD/SACD players and topline DVD players have a similar sound.

There is a review /comparison of the MF and BC (and the Perpetual) at audio-ideas.com.

I would add an Audio Note DAC to that list as well

You have to try them for yourself in your own system, there's no way around it, me thinks, as a digital front end is too subjective and system dependent to rely on the ears of others. If you don't have a very good dedicated transport you may want to skip on the Musica Fidelity, as it is very transport dependent, unlike the Bel Canto.

I'm currently using a Creek CD43 player. Good resolution, but a bit forward sounding. Not sure how good a transport it'll be??? Hopefully it won't suck, but I'm sure with more money I could do way better. I wonder what a good low end transport might be? I found it very informative to hear that the Bel Canto is less transport sensitive than the MF.

My experience with transports go back to a $1500 Meridian 200T that always gave me a lot of problem reading disks and finally died outright. Even Meridian didn't want to bring it back to life. I hated buying something for signficant money and then having it live a relatively short life. Especially when things like lasers seem to have a limited lifetime. Oh well...