DAC or CD Player

Ugin, if your budget is $4000, you have plenty of options available. I would say to go with the one box player at that price range. For instance, you can pick up a used ML No. 39, Simaudio Moon Eclipse, or brand new Linn Ikemi for under $4k. The Ikemi won't do 24/96 but in actual fact, very few recordings employ it anyway (about as many as SACDs I think). And a 24/96kHz CD player can't really play 24/96kHz recordings unless it's a real DVD player (like a CAL CL-20) so you will need another DVD player as a transport! Personally, my next digital upgrade would probably be a Linn Ikemi because there are probably about half a million titles encoded on regular CD and probably about half a thousand that are encoded on SACD or 24/96.

Sit tight.wait for whats going to happen with DVD-A.If you want buy a used player in the time being spend about 500/700 and wait.4000k invested today could very well get you 1k a year from now.

I would not want to spend $4K on any player that could not be upgraded to 24/96K in the future. I would also recommend auditioning a Bel Canto Dac 1 before going for $4k on an all in one player. I have a friend who has a Theta transport and a Pro Gen V and the only area where the Gen V beats the Bel Canto is in bass slam.