Onkyo C-7070 Reference CD Player: Are these any good? What are they similar to?

I guess not...

No experience with this player, but I have always liked Onkyo products for sound and reliability.  I think the headphone amp is a good feature if you do any serious headphone listening.  I recall buying a $200 Onkyo amp from Amazon while waiting for my $4000 Mastersound to arrive from Italy and the little Onkyo did not embarrass itself at all.  Others to look at in this price range are Marantz, Cambridge and NAD, but you are never going to hear them all together for a demo, so I would just look at them all and buy whatever intrigues you.  Good luck. 

Sorry, don’t own that particular model and haven’t heard it, but I still have one of Onkyo’s universal disc-changers from 2004 and it’s not only still going strong but sounds fine to me. I also have an Onkyo receiver running my home theater setup and you just can’t kill that thing...cats sleep on it, they trip the protection circuits constantly, and I personally blew the switched outlet on the back (my fault, not the Onkyo's fault), but that receiver just keeps on going. I’m waiting for it to die, so I can replace it with one that has Dolby Atmos, but it just keeps going!

I picked up a used Onkyo 7070 for my secondary system and it sounds very good.  I tried it in my primary system (CJ monoblocks and CJ ET 5 through old PSB Stratus Gold i speakers) and it fell short of the Musical Fidelity M6CD Player (older 2011 model).  But, this is a $700 vs $2,500 comparison.  The sound was clean, but soundstage was more compressed.  Having said that, for the $300 I paid for the 7070, I would buy another one just for a spare.  Very nice sounding.