Downloads and streaming are dominating the music world, but many people still enjoy listening to a CD. Let’s face it, most of us have loads of discs knocking around and it’s still the go-to music format for many. Some separate CD players simply spin discs brilliantly and nothing else; others have built-in streaming, pre-amps and other features. CD players feature a CD transport and a digital-to-analogue converter, the former reads the disc, pulls out the digital data and passes it to the latter, which turns it into actual music. The quality of the CD player’s components, from the disc mechanism to the chassis, can have a significant effect on sound quality. Some CD players have digital outputs that allow you to pass the signal to an external DAC.