Ask yourself this question. Do you find that the music (sound stage) becomes compressed as the size of the music increases (more instruments) and does the sound stage become congested as you turn up the volume with larger scale recordings? However, when you play small scale recordings, trios, female vocals without much instrumental support behind them, the sound stage is good, well defined, etc. . .
This is your CD player. I cannot tell you if it is the DAC portion of this player or what aspect. But the AA Primo CDP has this fault. I bought one when my AA Capitole needed to be repaired and figured the Primo would give me similar, but not as good perfomance. It was fine with small scale music, but fell apart with larger scale music.
While I hate to say this to you, my recommendation would be to dump the Primo and get either a better CDP or even one that may have digital inputs. You can try a DAC, but I don't know if it will fix the problem with the AA unit or not.
