12 Best CD Players for At-Home Listening in 2023

Spotify and its ilk make it easier than ever to stream the entirety of musical history, but all those audio files get compressed to tiny sizes and can end up lacking detail and richness. There’s a reason audiophiles bang on about “CD-quality” – it just sounds better.

Now, alongside the decade-long vinyl revival and the resurgence of the record player, we’re seeing CDs mount a comeback. In 2021 in the US, compact disc sales rose for the first time since 2004 and music fans in the UK bought over 14 million CDs in 2021.

So, if it’s time to dust off your physical disc collection or you’re after , here’s the Esquire edit of the best CD players to buy in 2023:

There are a whole host of arguments for why you should get back into CDs instead of record players or MP3 players. They’re affordable, support artists more than mere pennies-per-play on streaming, sound even better than records (and won’t skip) and come in collectable cases with stunning artwork and lyric booklets. Wave goodbye to shuffle and listen to your favourite songs the way the musicians intended.

The Need-to-Know

You don’t want to pick up a new player only to realise you can’t connect it to your speakers or that it needs batteries. So, before you buy, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

Player Type: The most premium type is a component player that fits into a larger system and won’t come with built-in speakers. Alternatively, you may be after an all-in-one system with built-in speakers and extra connectivity options, a simple boombox that can run off mains power or batteries, or a battery-operated portable model. We’ve included several convenient all-in-one systems in our list below, but there’s at least one model from each of these types in our roundup.

Outputs: You’ll want to take note of what outputs can connect to your player. All on this list have a headphone jack, but some devices will also have analog RCA outputs to connect to an amplifier or speakers. Some devices will have optical and coaxial outputs as well as the usual RCA, making them more versatile. If you pick a player that is just a “transport” that means it only includes the CD mechanics and will need a separate DAC (digital/analogue converter) to produce sound. It’s also worth looking at whether the one you pick can play files from a USB drive or if it has wireless options like Bluetooth or wifi.