DIGITAL FRONT END:

MSB Platinum Reference CD Station III: You can spend a lot more money for a transport with "air bearings". But, in my opinion, the MSB Platinum player has the best DACs and digital filtering commercially available and therefore it is sonically superior to any other offering I know of. Even the most expensive players out there are almost always using the same delta-sigma chip set DAC's and as a result you can end up spending 8 times as much for another CD player that produces inferior sound. The DAC in the MSB Platinum player represents a paradigm change, not a tweak. The stock DAC can be made even better with a "Signature" upgrade that substitute’s resistors calibrated to .01% for the standard ones that are calibrated to .1%. The Signature upgrade is a substantial yet worthwhile investment that removes any remaining traces of digital artifact while extracting more detail than anything I have ever heard.

The MSB Platinum Reference CD Station III comes with a very good passive preamp and an exceptionally good volume control (both can be bypassed by setting the volume control to zero)

MSB Platinum DAC III Preamp:   This is the same DAC and passive preamp as is in the Platinum CD III player. The DAC is responsible as much as anything for producing the Platinum CD player's great sound.  It can be bought separately, without the CD transport and has three types of digital inputs to accommodate an external player -- SPDIF (coax), AES/BEU (balanced), and Toslink (optical). You can also purchase a two channel upgrade card for a non-MSB CD player that provides up-sampling and a networking capability. This will enable your CD player to communicate with the external MSB DAC through the MSB proprietary network (cat5), which is quite exceptional. This same card can be used to upgrade your existing DVD audio player to be a true two channel 192k machine when played through the MSB network.  MSB was the first company to provide this upgrade capability.  Most DVD players still do not allow you to play DVD audio discs in a digital format and at the 192kHZ sampling rate. The "Signature" upgrade can be purchased for the stand-alone DAC as well.

ANALOGUE FRONT END:

SOTA & theCartridgeman: The Millennia vacuum turntable combined with the Conductor linear tracking air-bearing tone arm does what a turntable is supposed to do better than any offering I know of for under $25,000-- provide a stable, non-resonant platform and precise rotational speed. You need to spend 3 to 4 times as much to find anything that rivals its performance. The SOTA & theCartridgeman, when combined with a top notch component stand and a quality isolation platform, provides about as resonance-free and vibration-free LP playback as you can get. SOTA has many models to choose from including total packages including arm and cartridge. Made in the USA!  theCartridgeman, a venerable Englishman, producing not only the absolute best tone arm for under $8000 but phenomenal phono cartridges as well.