Denon 2900 CD (non modded) opinions please!

[TerrapinFlyr]

Hello All,
I have a Denon 2900 bone stock /non-modded.

I was wondering the opinion of others regarding how this 10 year old player holds up to today's $500-750 players?
Would a new $500 player of today beat the pants off of the old Denon2900 player?
I am only interested in the Denon's CD quality only, I am not concerned with DVD or blueray.

For instance how would the Denon2900 stack up against a NAD 546BEE, or a Cambridge 651?


Opinions please!

 

[prisoners]

I owned one for a long time and really liked it. I thought it was excellent on CD and came up just a bit short vs a Sony ES player for SACD playback. It was still very good, but IMO the very slight edge went to the Sony. The Denon does do DVD-A if that matters. For a stand-alone CD player I think it's great.

 

[Wolverine]

I got mine from AK'er Ehoove for my Denon set-up.
Great player for regular CD and SACD. Easy to use remote.

 

[SoNic67]

It is a very good player, NAD 546BEE is not even close. CA 651 same. You need to go at least to CA 851 to get something better, but then, you can get a Denon DVD 3910 (or 5910) on ebay that is at same level.
Output stage is based on TI's DSD 1790 chips, with proper external I/V converters (opamps NJM 2068), it is similar with their later products in 39xx class (later 29xx products had voltage-output DAC's).
The STEREO output has better analog stage than the multichannel ones - use that for CD.
It also uses a DSP (Sharc from AD) that does a good job on cleaning up CD jitter. The only minuses are the lack of HDCD decoding and Denon Alpha Processing 24 - upsampling for CD (is just deactivated in DSP programming).

Personally I prefer for CD players that have true multibit DAC's (R-2R) instead of those multilevel delta-sigma, but that's not a bad player. Especially for SACD is on par with almost any player out there - especially if the opamps are replaced with better ones.