Bjpd5ya1, you are doing an effective job of ruining what might have otherwise been a good thread. Your posts are barely coherent rants whose main contention as far as I can gather is that a Sony CD player assembled in Malaysia selling for $1500 cannot possibly compete in terms of sound quality with more expensive players assembled in Japan (or Switzerland.)
This contention is ludicrous. Did it ever occur to you that one of the main reasons the XA5400 is inexpensive is that it was assembled in Malaysia, where labor is cheap, and not in Japan, where labor is very expensive? Although globalization has its downsides, one of the main advantages is to lower prices by producing goods in the parts of the world with the lowest unit labor costs. Unlike some audio brands that fatten up their profit margins through this outsourcing, Sony doesn't have as much cache as a brand and therefore faces a more elastic demand curve than other "niche" audio companies with valuable brand names. When demand curves are elastic, revenues are maximized by setting a low price (moving the supply curve to the right.) This is a basic concept in economics and probably the one that Sony is following with the XA5400.
In any case, it would have been nice to hear the impressions of more audiophiles who have heard both the XA5400 and other players at higher price points. How, for example, does the 5400 compare to the PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC/Transport, the Ayon CD-2, the Meridian G08, the latest Ayre, etc.? That is information that would be helpful for those of us trying to decide on the appropriate budget for a digital source. If it makes no sense to spend $6,000 on the Perfect Wave combo when the XA5400 sounds equally good, I would like to know that.
This contention is ludicrous. Did it ever occur to you that one of the main reasons the XA5400 is inexpensive is that it was assembled in Malaysia, where labor is cheap, and not in Japan, where labor is very expensive? Although globalization has its downsides, one of the main advantages is to lower prices by producing goods in the parts of the world with the lowest unit labor costs. Unlike some audio brands that fatten up their profit margins through this outsourcing, Sony doesn't have as much cache as a brand and therefore faces a more elastic demand curve than other "niche" audio companies with valuable brand names. When demand curves are elastic, revenues are maximized by setting a low price (moving the supply curve to the right.) This is a basic concept in economics and probably the one that Sony is following with the XA5400.
In any case, it would have been nice to hear the impressions of more audiophiles who have heard both the XA5400 and other players at higher price points. How, for example, does the 5400 compare to the PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC/Transport, the Ayon CD-2, the Meridian G08, the latest Ayre, etc.? That is information that would be helpful for those of us trying to decide on the appropriate budget for a digital source. If it makes no sense to spend $6,000 on the Perfect Wave combo when the XA5400 sounds equally good, I would like to know that.