Meridian 508 vs Meridian 596

This is my opinion you may disagree, recently  I was at a friend's house listening to his system, which consists of a Meridian CD player(don't know the model), playing through a valve/tube pre and power amp and a very high efficient pair of speakers. Even though the system sounds quite good and open, the music is rather "edgy" typical of CD player nowadays. The pre and power amp would not reproduce edgy sound.

I then replace the Cd player with a computer based player as the front end, the music reproduce which may not be perfect is much smoother, it is an up sampling of Flac files to 24bit 192Kbit format.

That being said rather buying a Cd player now I think you should move to computer based front end. This the trend now rather buying another CD/DVD player, I think is waste of money besides it is NOT cheap( the good ones are not cheap). You can build a MAC based front end for less than $1,500( I bought a 2nd hand Mac for less than $250) plus a DAC, the combo I believe will out perform your CD player.

If those are your only choices, then the 508.24 gets my vote.

Meridian CD spinner are never edgy and world class component, it may came from other component in your friends setup!

Stereophile had those CD spinner listed on CLASS A! No worries they sound both excellent.

The founder and head engineer of Meridian Bob Stuart stated himself that the 596 was better sounding that the 508 24bits. The only CD spinner that was better at the time was the Meridian 588.

But the 508 player have XLR outputs that may be a necessity to you even if nowadays a digital connection is miles ahead from symmetrical one.