SACD certainly bests CD for me.

Esoteric DV-50's can be had for a reasonable amount - and they are fantastic players.... quite close to my old Linn Unidisk 1.1.

A few years back was at my then local stereo store, since moved and bought out, and heard a Diana Krall Cd on their set up, then using the same set up, heard the same album in SACD, there was no going back to just plain CD thereafter.
Its a few years old but since vinyl is my main focus, it works for me, the Marantz SA-14, way outshines the 8260, which gets a lot of play.
Did a test between the two, my son owned the 8260. Put it in my system for 3 days to warm up, hooked into aux, put on the same CD, no contest, the SA-14, won hands down, he was quite disapointed.
Wasn't produced for long, don't know why, but works for me and should be around $1000 or so used.

I'm going to sell my SACD's and player as my new CD player makes the CD layer sound better than my old player made the SACD's sound. The SACD player was a top of the line Sony but my new player sounds sooo much better and it's only CD...but 5 years of technology improvements makes a difference. If there were actually some titles coming out on SACD that I was interested in I might have stayed with it, but Classical is about all that is being released on the format anymore so what's the point if you don't listen to it? I only have 25 single layer SACD's and am in the process of copying them to CD (analog) with little loss of fidelity actually. The other 75 or so Hybrid SACD's will play fine on my CD player...and I have about 5,000 CD's so why buy a special player for 100 of them? See ya!

My Sony DVP-S9000es died a few months ago. Before it died I would compare it to my trusty Resolution Audio CD-50. The RA playing redbook gave nothing up to the Sony and usually sounded better to me.
Ncarv, how does the Sony repair policy work. I'd love to get mine repaired for $133. Thanks.

Jim,

Glad to hear you still like the DV-50!

Ken