SACD vs RBCD players

"Why are there not more SACD-player manufacturers in the high end?"

you have SACD players from Krell, Esoteric, Luxman, Accuphase, dCS, Ayre, Playback Designs, EMM Labs, McIntosh, Mark Levinson etc they all are making hi-rez players now since CD players ale limited to low-resolution only.

latest Esoteric and Luxman SACD players models

Hmmmm, not sure how to answer that question? I have 100's of LP's, hundreds of RBCD's and probably a hundred or so SACD's and I listen to all of them, but I'm not sure I can say what actual percentages would be? Music is a huge part of my lifestyle, so I'm more concerned with the performance and the music itself than anything else. SACD's always shine through relative to sound quality next to RBCD, but that's not to say that RBCD's are chopped liver and I don't like them! On the contrary, I think there are some FANTASTIC sounding RBCD's. Ultimately, good music is good music. I listen to a lot of different flavors; rock, jazz, lots of classical. With all genre's, higher rez digital media like SACD's always impress.

You mentioned before that you like classical music; may I suggest that you visit arkivmusik dot com and check out the SACD's they have available... I think you'll answer your concerns about performances, artists and availability.

As John says, don't talk yourself into something that you don't really want and won't value out of. If for you, pure RBCD is the way to go and that's what will make you happy, then that's what matters! I'm obviously a big proponent of SACD, but that doesn't invalidate another direction.

Happy listeneing!

new Denon DCD-SX SACD player

if this isn't hi-end I don't know what is ;-)

Thank you all for your input. After reading this thread through several times I've decided to go with an SACD player. The purpose of my prior post is simply to get some kind of an idea of how much SACD use I'm going to get out of the player.

In the case of John, above, only 10% of John's digital collection are SACD, so it could be said of John "that the number of SACDs [he] would listen to on a regular basis might not be that many", however they occupy a large 40% of his digital listening time. That sounds very promising to me.

Out of curiosity, I would be interested in hearing others usage habits.

I've owned several SACD and universal players, with the current incumbent being Unidisk. I've also found that the quality of redbook CD playback on universal players is subpar. That somewhat dictated my listening habit before, as I mainly collected and listened to SACD as much as I can. I have maybe one hundred SACDs, and used to be 70% SACD vs 30% redbook.

Recently I've played with outboard DAC, and other disk players of more recent design. As you probably know already the digital technology has advanced quite a bit in the last several years. I was surprised to find that the redbook playback on a modern disk player is actually quite good. With my new XA5400ES I hear a lot of detail on redbook CD. I'm going through my old redbook CD collection and finding the amount of detail and ambiance usually associated with SACD that I've never heard on redbook CD before.

I think the SACD has peaked in mid 2000 when the redbook CD playback technology hasn't reached the today's level. Many of the labels have dropped supporting SACD since. Today I still buy SACD whenever I can, if there is no comparable CD release, or it's not much more expensive than CD release. But I no longer purchase SACD exclusively any more. The usage is no longer biased towards SACD. I pop in whatever I want to listen to at the time, whether SACD or redbook.