Your virtues of vinyl and issues with CDs seem related to the packaging and associated paraphenalia and not the actual format?
I suspect others suggested this but if you want to spin discs why not use the maranta as a transport and just optical out to whatever unit/DAC you are using. I’m not a huge believer that the disc spinning matters much but that’s me. You can use the money to buy a DAC: Mytek, Chord.
Totally agree ! We do that a lot
Ok, the topic may go slightly off topic now but it’s a fun conversation. The reason why I bought a Nova and still wanted to use a CD player is because to this day I still haven’t found the answer to the question of whether playing a CD offers better sound quality than playing a FLAC from a hard drive or NAS. There are many conflicting opinions which is very much the same as the opinions regarding whether the type of speaker cable makes a difference to the sound.
And the Nova offered a very good all in one package. A good amp and an incorporated streamer as well. As well as a gorgeous design (unfortunately the plain black box with the green lights that some other Naim boxes offer does not do it for me).
I think I might do a test by playing the flac files from the harddrive attached to the Nova and play the same album on cd player and then compare the sound quality. If I feel it is the same then I might retire the CD player alltogether and stick with flac.
I was brought up with CDs and when the vinyl resurrgence happened I caved in and bought a Rega P3 (4 years ago). Attached it to the Nova and started playing vinyl. I was underwhelmed. There is a thread in here, somewhere, that i started at the time expressing my disappointment. However, I recently bought a Technics SL1200G and I am a changed man. The difference in sound is huge (I suppose it is expected considering the huge difference in price). I have been scouring ebay for old albums that I like and I have gone slightly mad and last month alone I bought about 60 records. 
For me the reason for getting vinyl is the sound quality. The larger printed artwork, etc does not bother me much.
Funnily enough I have a few laser discs which are a novelty and a pleasure to look at (large size and all that) but I could never imagine giving up dvd for laser discs. I think that whomever came up with laser disc kept the same format as vinyl in roder to capitalise from that but it did not work.
Slightly off topic again but I am seriously thinking about buying a Gryphon Diablo 300.
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You’d need a heck of a good source for that! It would be a lot more than either £700 or £1,300.
Are you on the Jungle Juice??
Why not just a 120?
Can you listen to both at dealer place. I am very curious on how they sound. The look is gorgeous, and only one box with phono and dac.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but to me these over-sized Gryphon Diablo “spaceships” look like radiators that make music…
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I suppose the 120 is also decent although less powerful. The 300 apparently has some decent improvements over it. In regards to the dac and phono I believe they are not included but can be added as optional extras.
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Absolutely hideous.
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Why?? What’s wrong with buying a Diablo?
Well, my Technics SL1200G would be one and as far as CD goes I can go transport plus Chord DAC.
Well, in a very literal way, hifi is a radiator of sound. A bit more applicable to loudspeakers though.
Have you ever heard of Oppo? They show up on eBay and audiogon. I don’t think there’s anybody on this blog that can bad name a Oppo unit. Some of the people on this website seem to be anti CD. I’ve always liked them because you could take them out of your house and play them in your car. Let’s see you do that with an LP.
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Loved my CDS1 - not fantastically detailed but hard to find anything more musical.
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