No way to know which player will actually sound best at each price point unless I had about 15 different machines here. I have an Oppo 970 here and with just a few preliminary mods it is already sounding quite good...quite scary really how much detail this thing retrieves....I will have info next week about the various mods to that player (more than likely I will be selling the Oppo with mods). My sense is that the Oppo 970 will give incredible sound modded but some other people will already have another machine that they like and will want modded. After a few months of modding different players I can give some kind of recommendation as to what player at what price point gives whatever sound quality but at this point I think the Oppo 970 is going to be hard to beat (this based on mods I did before on the Panny S47, Samsung and Toshiba universals....the Oppo retrieves way more info stock than any of those players). What is really cool about the Oppo 970 is that it plays all formats (SACD, DVD-A, HDCD, whatever)....it does play SACD as 24/88 or something like that....it converts DSD to PCM....some purists will think this is a no no but several very expensive players convert DSD to high res PCM before the DACs with great sound quality, including all the super expensive Esoteric machines. According to Oppo, the 970 sounds the best of their three players.
There will be no digital input....sorry, that is a lot of design work....and not that many people would be interested. Stand alone players sound quite incredible by themselves....If you want to use a DEQ2496 then the best thing to do is have a super modified transport, super digital cable and then modify the DEQ so it will have incredible sound. The DEQ has a very good DAC chip in it....it could sound wonderful modified. However, it would cost mucho more for the modified transport, great cable and mods to the DAC.
