help a Die hard ANALOG guy choose a budget CDP

First things first: audition Naim budget CD player if u can: CD5 or used CD3, these should go for under a thou. My CDS3 or my older CDX cannot beat my Keel-ed Sondek/Aro but they do sound "alive" playing CDs...
ripping my collection of a few thousand classical CDs did not work out for me: all the copies of the 9th ended into one folder and its a full-time job to rename tags as No.9, No9, #9, etc...plus with all new boxes ($1 per CD) coming up I do need a CD player... For pop musik a laptop and DAC should suffice, plus considering the amount of compression for the sake of winning the "loundness war" and all the butchering during mastering, even MP3 files sound as good as FLAC.
read the last chapter in Schiit Happened by Mike Moffat of Theta Digital: he left the industry when decent DACs became unavailable, Naim bought whatever was left out there in the early 90-ies, so if CD5 is HDCD- compatible, it should sound OK, otherwise a spinner and a decent DAC from, say, schiit, is your ticket..........

Yes, its them! My CDS3 had its laser mech excanged three(!) times by AVOptions, but my older "olive series" CDX works non-stop for 17 years now without any glitches. I am Very happy with Naim service... My experience with Linn was not this pleasurable: when my Linn Classik needed a tuneup (laser sled mech became noisy) the responce was that its 10years old, they won't touch it. I had to fix it myself, got lucky! Same with my Wadia 781i: Wadia response was that if anything happens they will fix it but they don't have spare transports/laser mechanisms. And my Wadia was still under warranty at that time, truly amazing how some companies operate :-(
I also had Krell SACD Standard until it died on me, like all those first SACD players from Krell and Musical Fidelity. Loved the looks of McIntosh SACD player but it sounded too "polite" (some call it "fluid") to my tastes, so I sold it here on Audiogon. What else... Bought Linn Akurate but its digital power supply f$&@-ed the rest of my all-Naim system so I had some fun time returning it to my local Linn dealer for a credit.
Sorry, I talk too much about SACD players but there is a Lot of excellent SACDs in classical music these days, and the prices are lower than hi-def downloads

2channel8: I have CDS3 for CDs and Wadia for SACDs, for the last few months I am torturing myself trying to choose which one to keep and cannot choose! Keeping both, feel real stupid about this.  

I feel your pain! Bought Japanese mini-LP set with a promo box of Camel,  and now they reissued all Camel  albums as SACDs! What to do, "what a poor boy should do"...