I don't know if this has occured to anyone else, but there is more to a CD player then how well it will play a CD. Most users that purchase a higher end CD player are paying for better reliability and also features that a cheap CD player doesn't have. Yes, you can find a $20 CD player, but it will probably break within a year. That same cheap player is also not going to have certain connection options and features that higher priced models will have, such as analog for SACD and HDMI support. I've also noticed alot of these players have very good internal decoding and processing in case your receiver does not support it. This is a very nice feature and worth the money. I think the best thing to do is find a player that does everything you need at a reasonale price. A good example is the Oppo players. They have about all the features you need and are sold at a reasonable price.
First of all, one can occasionally get a "respectable" CD player for next to nothing. I bought a Marantz CD player at a thrift store for $20, and it worked great, and looked almost new. I ended up selling it for a profit, because I had too much equipment.
Second, there is absolutely no way a high end CD player can be reliable enough to warrant the extra cost. An inexpensive player can last for several years. One that costs 5 times as much should last 5 times as long. But that is unlikely to be the case.
Third, by all means, buy according to the features you want. No one ever said that one should not.
Fourth, the Oppo players are not "high end" CD players. They are DVD players that happen to also play CDs, like pretty much all DVD players. And they are not even that expensive for DVD players (check out the higher end of the Denon line to get an idea of what a "high end" DVD player may cost). Certainly, if one wants something that can play DVDs, SACDs, DVD-Audio discs, or any of the other formats the Oppo players can handle, they can be a great choice. I recently bought the Oppo DV-983H player, and it is, by far, the best DVD player I have ever used. I unreservedly recommend it for someone wanting great DVD performance (if they can use its HDMI output). Indeed, its performance for every type of disc I have tried with it has been superb. But if all one wants to play are CDs, then it would be a waste of money, and would be more complicated and feature lacking than what a typical ≈$100 CD player could do. For about $100, one can get a new CD carousel 5 disc changer that will have every CD player feature that you will find on an Oppo, plus a few other CD player features you cannot commonly get on any DVD player.
To be blunt, if one is only wanting CD playback, all of the Oppo players would be bad choices, as they cost more than one needs to spend, and have a poor feature set for CD playback. But if one wants to also play other kinds of discs, such as SACD or DVD, then they become very attractive options, and which Oppo would be best will depend upon what, exactly, one will play on it and with what other equipment one will be using it (as well as one's budget).
In most of my systems, I have separate CD players, because they typically load faster, are easier to use, and are more feature intensive (for CD playback options) than multi-type disc players. They can also be had very cheaply. Of course, they are unnecessary if one already has something else that will play CDs (like a DVD player). In the case of the opening post of this thread, Panhandler801 said that he (or she) already has a PS3, which can play CDs. So there is no need for Panhandler801 to buy any CD player at all. However, if one is desired, there is no need to spend much money on it to get all of the features Panhandler801 is likely to want for CD playback.
