These early machines really are quite competent, even if filter ripple and THD / IMD(+N) obviously are not up to modern standards. These Philips/Marantz players do not seem to be bothered by intersample-overs either, reproducing them faithfully - more than you can say about some late-'90s jobs when incorporating upsamplers became all the rage for a while (alas, at exactly the time when the loudness wars were in full swing - a real *facepalm* moment). IMHO, CD playback was basically solved by 1994.
1st gen CD players were not 16-bit, they were 14-bit.
Nobody was doubting that they were using 14-bit DACs (TDA1540). If you actually bother to read the SAA7030 datasheet, you will find that
2. It performs noise shaping so that a 14-bit DAC yields the same in-band quantizing signal-to-noise ratio as from a 16-bit DAC supplied with unprocessed 44,1 kHz samples.
Those Philips engineers were a clever bunch. Mind you, 14 bits at 4X OS is giving you 15 bits effective to begin with, so it would have been maybe 2nd-order noise shaping tops, but using any at all in
1983-ish is pretty wild. The 98 dB(A) SNR found in CD54 lab testing basically confirms the claim.
As for the OP's question, I would not generally bother with a CD player but just rip everything, especially those releases that aren't available on streaming. 200 CDs isn't an unmanageable amount, and prioritizing may leave you with only a few dozen to start with. While ripping can generally be done with more or less free software like "old faithful" EAC, some investment into e.g. dBpoweramp may be worth it to get access to some decent metadata providers. That's the part that often tends to hold you up the longest - ripping a CD in itself is a matter of maybe 5 minutes even if limiting speed to 24X (I do not consider putting undue stress on the bearings just for half a minute less ripping time a worthwhile tradeoff).