CD/SACD player Under $4000

@zx10 

i second the Denon

+3 for the Denon A-110. When my Sony gave it up I looked and read up on new offerings. Short of laying out $ for an Esoteric, I think the Denon holds its own. It is very well built, uses a quad of PCM 1795’s and high quality, audio grade components. The drawback would be for folks wanting balanced outs, The A-110 is SE only. 

@kennyc here’s my beef with shanling 3.3 player…

1. It has Bluetooth receiver - potentially added noise in a circuit

2. No native DSD - it converts DSD to DoP internally then sends it to its DAC (that’s my understanding but I could be wrong).

The Onyx transport has no Bluetooth. It still converts DSD to DoP but sends it out via AES. My Meitner DAC will eat that and I’m pretty sure it’s better than the Shanling’s internal DAC. And I don’t have to deal with tubes :). 
So the Onyx XST-20 is super appealing to me both from functionality and price viewpoints. 

From my perspective I would rather put $10k+ on a DAC and at most 2k on a transport.

I received my imersiv D-1 DAC back from the shop with the new feature enhancement, DoP on SPDIF. Now I was all excited to finally hear this setup with the D.BOB and the Oppo. Unfortunately, the D.BOB is broken and I likely need send it in repair or just toss it. When something similar happened to my Sony SCD-1 SACD player I lost both the transport and the DAC. In this case, with the D.BOB it is a $600 write off.

I will order the Shanling Onix in 4 weeks when I get back from traveling. 

The Onyx transport has no Bluetooth. It still converts DSD to DoP but sends it out via AES. My Meitner DAC will eat that and I’m pretty sure it’s better than the Shanling’s internal DAC. And I don’t have to deal with tubes :). 

@audphile1 Your Meitner MA3i is tremendous with DoP on SPDIF. I had it for 3 weeks and the sole reason I kept bugging imersiv to add that feature on the D-1 DAC. I tested this with the used $250 Oppo. I thought the Meitner setup was better than the $10k Bricasti M19 transport I heard with the Bricasti DAC. The DAC is the key from my view not the transport. The Meitner MA3i is at another level over the Bricasti DAC

@yyzsantabarbara agreed. the MA3i was definitely a nice upgrade over the Bricasti M3 in my system.