Seems to me that bringing in the Sony Player bargain and benefits fits quite well with both a primary intent of the Ultra, but also in the context of forums being tools for learning from, and helping one another...in this case, letting us know about a good multichannel player at a great price. Computer versus transport....hmmmm, maybe off the thread, but interesting. So I propose we work that over in its own thread. A few comments first, and then a link to a new thread for this discussion....Please join in!
No matter what circuits or transport mechanism we use to decode and convey CD data, in the beginning, it is just that....data. CD Players, a combined transport and DAC in a one box, are one of our options to get the data into music. But transports bring with them the issues of error correction and jitter, issues inherent to transports and the CDs themselves. So a big part of its job is extracting the data with as little error and jitter as possible, and then the DAC section removes or masks what remains, while converting the data into analog music.
Properly done, with a good computer and a good setup, errors and jitter are for the most part solved. Technically, in this, I think we have as good a beginning as is presently possible to get the CD data ready for the data-to-music conversion. Regardless of other circuit decisions, I can't conceive of any question as to the efficacy of eliminating the errors and jitter from the start.
With either method, choosing circuits and circuit paths to the end of what we like brings a designers preferred tonal attributes to the stuff that shows up at the output jacks.
Then, the fun part....the preferences of us listeners . It seems to me that this is really where the questions of personal tastes come in, and that this is separate from the questions of the technology. How satisfied are we with how the data became music within a given system?
My take right now anyway.....and I find this area fascinating.
Here is a link to a more fleshed out thought process if you are interested.
https://www.decware.com/cgi-bin/yabb22/YaBB.pl?num=1304032802/0#0