SACD/CD Drive Mechanism Replacement

Streaming is just like analog… the more you invest the better it sounds (subject to choosing wisely). Analog and digital sound and cost the same on my system. That can be accomplished at different price levels. See my systems.

A SACD player is a one box: transport, streamer (dedicated to the transport) and a DAC.

To stream, you need a Streamer and DAC. I own and recommend Aurrender streamers The lowest level sounds great and each higher tier sounds better. I have their flagship (recently discontinued, W20SE) and have had the Berkely DAC of which you heard… although surprisingly I prefer the sound of the Audio Research Reference DAC 9.

Once you have equivalent sound quality on streaming your world of music will change. Suddenly your library has over ten million albums. On Qobuz over half a million are high resolution. The world of music opens up. I have a collection of 2,000 albums and a great $45K analog end that I never listen to now.

I have a relatively inexpensive Denon DCD-1700NE sacd player.  For around $1500, I think it's a really nice sounding player.  I only have a few sacd, but a ton of cds that I've collected over the years.

I had been playing cds almost exclusively, but I recently purchased an Innuous Zen Mk3 streamer.  It's not their top model, but it does pretty well when fed into my Gustard R26 dac (via a U18).  It has a cd drive built into it that can be used to rip really good copies of cds to it's internal storage.  I didn't buy it for that feature, but I now find it pretty useful. 

I have a Marantz TT-15S1 turntable with a Hana ML moving cartridge and Sutherland TZ Vibe phono stage.  Not super high end, but it sounds nice.  I don't use it a lot because streaming is so convenient and I'm discovering a lot of new music through streaming (Qobuz).

@ghdprentice 

Great looking system and listening room!  I can imagine it sounds amazing!

So, for streaming, do you pay a monthly subscription fee or by the song?

Can you listen to a full album or only one song at a time?

Can you save favorites and then shuffle amongst them like hitting shuffle on a cd player?

Will the streaming sound as good as the physical disc?

Can I control it all from my iPhone?

Sorry for all the questions, this is really all very new to me. 

Best wishes,

Don

Don,

Monthly fee… like $14.99 you get assess to over ten million albums and thousands of internet channels. Yes, about the cost of one CD a month.

Streaming (assuming a good quality streamer) will sound the same as a red book CD or SACD if the same master and often HD versions may be available so the will sound better than a CD. On my system I can play a CD, stored file, streamed file and vinyl album they will sound the same. There is a bit of variability on the vinyl depending on what copy number it was on the master… later ones do not sound good.

I typically listen to full albums but you can search and find by albums, artists, songs or genre. There are lots of list (photos of album covers with artists and album name) of new releases and different kind of recommendations.

You can use an iPhone but you really want to use an iPad… you’ll start exploring a nearly infinite world of music quickly.

You also have a library… where any albums (or just songs) you like can be collected so you can easily find them. The streamer will go out and check and see if you have any albums on your network and copy them into your streamer if you want. There are playlists you can create of songs.

Whole new world… you want in.

Wowza, $14.99/mth is dirt cheap.  I pretty much consistently spend a few hundred or more monthly on vinyl records from all over the world.  I pay 2 to 3 x's more for the shipping of one record than the monthly fee of streaming, so that's a big win right there alone!

I'm glad to hear that you do not seem to hear a difference between the formats.

Do you think the streamer or the dac makes the most difference in the sound reproduction?

Because I've always listened to vinyl, I am used to and actually prefer listening to whole albums.

When you talk about the library... is that stored on the iPad or maybe in my case MacBook Pro laptop; or is it stored in the streamer with either built in storage or added on storage?

Thank you for taking the time to help me better understand this new world of music curation.

Best wishes,

Don