Yes I have a Rio Player and yes it is one really cool unit but for a true high end audiofile the CD is still better.

I could argue with you about this on many levels, but, being totally objective, you can still load uncompressed WAV files onto the empeg and not suffer any compression artifacts or the degradation that would occur in the D/A of the CD player (of course, that assumes that the D/A of the empeg is better than the D/A of the CD player plus whatever path it has to take in order to get to the empeg's EQ, which you can argue).

Of course, that doesn't help in your IASCA SQ competitions, but, then, I'm personally much more interested in impressing myself than everyone else.... I'm sure Doug might have more to add to that.