I was wonderin' why you needed so many inputs!
For a while, I used a 300 disk Pioneer F27 in the garage. While it provided the ability to listen to lots of music, cherry picking tracks from one disk to another was clunky, slow and ultimately changers are limited in capacity.
I'm going to suggest a different path for your "cast of thousands" input requirement: Computer based library using a compact renderer for playback. Yes, it did take a while to rip all my CDs. Today, however, I cannot imagine not having the convenience of instantly playing any track from any album without having to wait a long time for a changer to orchestrate its mechanical dance. It also means you can mix multiple formats in the same library - I have a growing number of high resolution albums and also some MP3 tracks where that was the only way I could get them or only wanted a single track from an album.
You can assemble a
well configured Raspberry Pi based player for $200 and just need a network connected laptop/computer for music storage. It's about the same size as two decks of cards:
Selection is via either iPad or iPhone
using iPeng app. Android flavors available, too. The Ultimate Remote Control for music selection or allowing it to randomly choose content from your library - which has helped me rediscover old friends. You can also use it for streaming internet based radio or music services like Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, Quobuz, etc. I use Tidal HIFI.
Yes, the 400-disc Sony multi-disc players are slow - in every way. Slow to load, slow to label texts, slow to change discs and, with three players in one cabinet, exceedingly slow to switch from a disc in one machine to a selection in another machine. I ripped all my CDs to my laptop for my Zune mp3 player, at 320mbps. I use the Zune software to access my PC music, and I really like its skin. User-friendly in many ways, but doesn't support lossless, AFAIK. So my files aren't as good a source as my CDs.
Whenever I've tried to get some sort of handle on how to store and access lossless files, to figure out what I need, I am overwhelmed with choices and recommendations, strange acronyms, and IThis and android-that, and various software choices that must be made in order to transform these files somehow, for reasons I don't understand, using alien verbs to describe their action. We have no wireless phone service. I've never used a smartphone period. I chose to buy a Zune about 15 years ago because I wanted to avoid iTunes.
I am a dinosaur crashing clumsily through a digital world.
I'm not even sure whether lossless is doable at all without Android or iSumpin', but we decided long ago that we don't need cell-phones, nor their big service bills, nor keeping them charged. We are such homebodies - especially me with health issues (but Christine also, just by nature) - that I can't even recall the last time a cell-phone might have been even slightly helpful to us. So that is my first question, because I'm not paying for a cellular plan just to be able to play music via my stereo. I think that means a Raspberry wouldn't help, but I'm not even sure of that, thinking it's a smartphone - or close kin to one - which requires such service.
I know there is such a think as FLAC, but I don't understand how to get from here to there as far as ripping and playing them from my PC. I believe there are several other lossless file types, too. Not sure. It seems everybody has different software solutions, and threads in which various AKers discuss these things might as well be written in ancient Assyrian for me. Yes, I'd love to be able to copy my CDs and play them back more quickly than my clunky old CD players, but maybe I'm just sorta old and definitely clunky myself, making it a good fit.
But it isn't. And I can't figure out what may be, if anything. I do know that three Sony 400-disc CD/SACD/DVD players take up a great deal of real estate in my cabinet - each as big as a beefy amplifier. The best thing about them is I can put twelve hundred discs in them, store their jewel boxes in the attic, and access any one of them without rising from my chair, but I would dearly love to put all that music into a high-quality format in a smaller, faster device, but which format, what device, and how to get there elude me.