oppo 105d mod or look for a new cd player ?

Have you considered buying a used Alpha Dac 1 for under $2000?

Why would anyone buy a CD player?? The Oppo will play all discs And with the Modwright Mod it will blow away the Ayre and the Esoteric in terms of warmth and richness and space and soundstaging. Go with the Modded Oppo its the best deal in audio right now for a source. IMO.

Matt M

Just buy a DAC. The Oppo will work great as a transport.

I personally think the industry pulled a fast one on us with the idea of using stand alone dacs. One of the elements that you were comparing when buying a CD player was how good the DAC Chip was in it. I hold on to the old fashioned idea that the CD player should have a really top notch DAC. Stop playing into this crazy-ness. I'm sure the industry is delighted with us doing separate DACS, they get to charge you roughly twice what they could charge for a good deck with of course a good dac section! for crying out tears.

"07-24-15: Mechans
I personally think the industry pulled a fast one on us with the idea of using stand alone dacs."

Actually, you can make a pretty good case for the opposite. If you remember when CD's were starting to get popular in the late 80's and early 90's, someone figured out that jitter was degrading sound quality. And that it was much more prevalent in transport/dac combos. At the time they found one of the best ways to reduce jitter, was to use a single box CD player. As a result, a lot of very high end CD players were made and they outsold component CD players by a large margin.

Dac's are getting very popular now because so many people are using a PC as a transport. And to answer your question as to why there are not many disk players with digital inputs, its that the industry is getting away from disks in general and the demand keeps getting lower. So, if manufacturers started putting optical transports in all the dacs they build, you could say that you're being charged for something you don't need.