I did a bunch of research a few years ago and settled on a mid range Marantz CD6004 player. I see the current version of it is the CD6006. It is a single disk player but accepts a USB input. I use a CD when I want to sit down and listen, but plug in an iPod when I want background music without the bother of changing disks.
I concluded that jitter was one of the issues in CD playback that potentially can produce the digital noise that some object to. There are high end CD playback systems which break up the player and D/A conversion into separate units, but they tend to have clock matching issues which can produce jitter. I think it is better to keep it simple and all in one box, where the designer can control the whole process.