Phil A

Re: Does such a CD player exist??

A CD player basically consists of a couple of devices. The laser reads what is on the disc and passes it to the built in DAC (digital to analog converter). The CD player also includes a transport to play the disc. You then take the signal out of the rear of the unit with an analog left and right output. As I noted above you can take out a digital output (toslink or coax) into a rec'r but then you're dealing with the DSP (digital signal processor) engine to go thru a chain of various circuitry to somewhere down the chain re-convert the signal to analog so it can be played over your analog speakers. On a home theater product, which may be great home theater, it will not necessarily be optimized for 2-channel music (depending on how discriminating your tastes are).

An outboard DAC is basically the same type of component that is built into the CD player w/o the transport. You can use a DVD player as a transport. The DAC receives the digital signal (and could do various functions such as reclock it, over sample it, upsample it - some units have options) and then you take the signal out of its analog outs into an analog input (and probably with an analog direct type mode on the rec'r or preamp to aviod signal processing) of the rec'r. Computer hard drive playback likely eliminates some of the jitter (timing differences) one can get with playing with a physical CD. So if you had a PC/laptop with a CD drive as well and a digital output (to put into the DAC) on the sound card, you can use it to store the music (I'm not a big PC expert - I'm sure there are others on this board who - I just have played with lots of audio stuff in lots of systems) and playback. If the DAC has more than one input you can also put another device into it. Some DACs even have USB inputs. So you can put your DVD player output into it too and if you play something like Neil Young's Greatest Hits on 24/96 (assuming your DAC can take that sampling freq. mine is older will do just 48k hz) DVD-V disc or a DVD-A disc that has tracks (some do) that can be passed digitally you can run them thru the DAC too.

Obviously w/o the moving parts of a transport, a DAC can last a while and you can use other transports with it as you change stuff down the road. Mine is likely about 12 yrs. old (MicroMega DuoPro) and probably listed for about $3k in its day. When I play stuff, people are often blown away by the quality. I traded useless stuff (to me) worth perhaps a couple of hundred about 6 yrs. ago. Micromega stopped (at least for a bit have not checked recently) distributing in the US (French co.) and few heard of it and they use to OEM a DAC for an even higher end co. that probably had similarities to mine. It is not uncommon in the audio industry.