Ok. Now I've purchached an iRiver H340 and the new Xin SuperMacro-3 V6 portable headphone amp. But I should probably get a portable CD player too.... Any recommendations? It should ofcourse have resonable skip protection, and apart from that good build quality, a good DAC, and a good (true) line-out for outputting to the SM-3. Any other features that would be important? Any thoughts? Thanks!

Sony makes real good portable CD players. Check them out. I don't see why they would be desirable when flash based players are abound.

Thanks! Spesific models?


As mentioned I already got a HD based player for my oggs and mp3's. (Flash cards are max 2 gigs, aren't they.... Bit small, even if I guess you can carry several and swap them.)
But sometimes one is inclined to play the actual physical medium of the CD, and then it could be nice to have a player I can stash in my rucksack. Maybe.

If you can track down any iRiver imp-xxx models, I would highly recommend them.

imp-900 was the last model which supported audio only AFAIK.

imp-1000 had a video-out and could play MPEG-4 movies as well.

Most portable players that have "skip protection" have a buffer in which they store the audio as ADPCM which is of lower quality. I'd say stick to the DAP's.

Interesting.
The imp-900 manual says:
So does this mean @ 40 sec skip protection, music is uncompressed? This would make sense since 16bit PCM takes up 4x the memory of 4bit ADPCM.

Newegg has som 8GB compactflash cards for sale...now as far as what hardware actually supports them, that's a different story.

I use Panasonic SL-CT820 (the black one) and would highly recommend it, because it has all the features to enjoy the music. The player itself is very slim, lightweight and robust enough, has line-out and optical out, great DAC, good skip-protection, proper support to MP3 (no skipping on VBR files, etc.), handy remote with backlit display and probably the longest playback time.