DAC or CD Player. Help!

rsa
Like others have said, everything matters.

For a beginner I recommend a cd player that also serves as a dac - you eliminate the synergy variables, for the most part, & it allows a foray into decent computer audio. An upside is that you can always add a better dac in the future too.

Three that come to mind based on increasing cost are:
Music Hall c-dac15.3 - $550 street
Audiolab 8200cdq - $1,200 or so street
Rega Suturn-R - $2,600 or so street

If you are looking for direction on specific purchase(s) it would be helpful if you define for us your current system and what you wish to accomplish.

My system is pretty well set and I am happy with it (theres always room for improvement). I just  bought a new DAC and CDP and was wondering which unit was producing the most of the music. Thanks everybody for your help!

Congrats on your purchases. Are you using the player as a transport via the DAC?

I still and will always contend that expensive boutique cables are 100% snake oil. Some of the priciest manufacturers of this stuff hedge their claims 10 ways to Tuesday while struggling to make a case for their HUGE markups.

Take Zu Audio. I'll drop in the link at the bottom to their take on cable burn-in, but first you have to know why cable burn-in is even an issue. You pay 10-20x per foot what a decent piece of Belden or Monoprice cable costs and even though you want to hear that astounding difference your mind is telling you something else. So if the industry floats long burn-in times for cable, guess what's likely to happen after you've listened to these cables for many hours? That's right, you keep them. Or the return policy has expired. Either way you own them now. 

Take a look at Zu's take on burn-in. Count the weasel-words like "seems to", "potential to," and the endless prevarication and unsubstantiated claims, even when it involves their own "heavy investments in exploiting the phenomenon" did they actually write that? Yes, they did! They also write copious words signifying nothing to end with this:

"If they don’t sound awesome right out of the box, please give them time to loosen and warm up."

Read it for yourselves, and remember, snake oil comes off pretty easily. Buy yourself a spool of Monoprice 12AWG speaker wire, make two cables and then run a blind listening test whereby someone else switches them for your big buck foo-foo cable and guess which cable is hooked up. Run this test 5-10 times over the course of a couple days. Give it time. Track the guesses.

There's power in truth; save all that money and buy music with it. That is why you've invested 1000s in gear, right?

http://www.zuaudio.com/questions-list/2013/8/18/what-is-burn-in