In my experience, you can get fine sound for cheap by connecting the CD to the receiver digitally. To a very large extent, the sound quality will then only be limited by the quality of the DAC in the receiver. The exception to this is "word clock jitter" in the CD transport, which seems to be at such a low level you'll never notice unless the rest of your system cost tens of kilobucks.
A friend and I sorta tested this by doing A/B tests with a Musical Fidelity A3CD connected analog and a Pioneer Elite (model PD-F27) 300 disk changer connected digitally to a Pioneer Elite VSX-37TX receiver running into Celestion A3s. The $600 Pioneer actually sounded at least as good, with a clearly lower noise floor, than the $1500 MF. The Pioneer receiver uses the well-regarded Burr-Brown DAC, which doesn't seem typical of receivers in it's price range.
This is probably irrelevant if you're looking at CD players in the $3K range since they darn well better have DACs way superior to any receiver out there.
Note that if your receiver digitizes analog inputs in order to perform bass management in the digital domain (I don't know if the Outlaw does, but many do), spending big bucks on a CD player may be a waste of money since you'll be limited by the quality of the Outlaw's DAC regardless of how you connect.