Good cd players have good dac's in them. But to my way of thinking, why do you need to keep reading the 1's and 0's every time? Hthey shouldn't change. Unlike vinyl which changes every time the needle scratches its way through the valley like a plough... So anyway, if you have the data, wat you really need is the decent dac to decode it well. My ears can't hear any difference between the good ones - but bad ones are terrible. Same goes for lossless info versus low quality mp3. It's easy to hear low rate mp3, but impossible for me to hear anything between wav , apple lossless or flac.