I purchased an oppo under the understanding that it was cd audiophile grade. It is not. Can anyone tell me the best cd player to hook up to a macintosh preamp? Oppo is telling me to send the oppo back and purchase the 83. Is NAD568 audiophile grade? Asking for help to get the best deal for the money.
Get a cheap but decent Blu Ray player like a Sony or Samsung for under a benjamin and use HDMI out for external decoding , Loose the coaters or digitize them correctly to spinning metal with a PC ODD and or instead just get millions of losless 16/44 FLAC tracks and albums you can't possibly have the room to conveniently organize and store on CD media at Tidal Hi Fi premium 16/44 FLAC streaming on a compatible device or Win. PC/MAC PC and Chrome and a not spendy competent DAC or a decent AVR or media player or HD player or PC with competent DAC in the device or USB DAC .
PCM 44/1 audio data doesn't care if it comes off a HDD or spendy CD player not expensive BD player or PC ODD or spendy HDD player , it's usually more stable off a HDD anyway and WAY faster to switch tracks ,albums ,songs and load and you can view the cover art and metadata with a PC .
HDMI can do 2.0 hires and muklti channel hires also but HDMI ARC is constrained to 2.0 lossless or up to 7.1 protected content audio /vidio data just like optical data .
Tidal FLAC 16/44 is better than 99.9 % of commercial CD but it all starts with a good recording/mix either way .
The usual provenance at Tidal Hi FI FLAC are 24 bit mixes and 24 bit digitized analog contact media from the labels before CD media mixing in POST and they are only truncated to 16 bit FLAC without audio degradation before steaming .
CD and NEW CDP are foolish in 2017 unless you have one already you like or haven't digitized your CD collection correctly but a PC ODD is as good as anthing for all that or playing CD for external PCM/44 decoding ,they get buffed to volatile memory within RBCD error tolerance you cant hear anyway you don't hear them so much as exactly what they are spinning to the Optical reader in real time like a vinyl record.
Outside of a poor mix you can't fix with a spendy CDP or spendy good for nothing bling cables digital artifacts are inaudible below the RBCD or 16 bit lower nyquist rate you cant hear anyway .
If you understand digital music at all ,you should know all this or at least understand it now ,but if you don't ,you don't and will continue the futility of CDP use and maybe spendy exotic metal fool cables .
Outside of that a HDD and not spendy competent dac is the thing now ouside of lossless streaming or with it and maybe loose the ancient plastic coasters altogether or store them , analog out from a CDP is wholly unnecessary in 2017 and yesterday's news and BD are getting there