I’ve owned a mega priced units and this newer Marantz. The SA-10S1 is a steal for the price and sound reproduction. My last player was the older Esoteric K-01, the Marantz was in no way below it, except for massive dynamics that really threw the music at you, the Marantz is more gentle and real sounding. The setting once burned and I played a lot with them was Dither Off, Noise shaping 3-1, all other non-used functions like headphones off, depending on your system and gear polarity could be normal or reversed, my system normal.
BUT here is a big one to try, in my system by chance I turned the headphone gain from medium to low, and the sonics improved so much that I could not believe this, and why I do not know, so I changed them perhaps 20 times from high, med, and low and every time I heard the difference, my wife downstairs said whatever you did that sound s better.
On the low setting, the music has more body, dynamics, and bottom end, and blackest background. I don’t know if Marantz caught this in the design but the settings do impact the sound big time. So give it a try, I fell upon it by luck, just wanting to change it to the low setting hit play again and my jaw dropped.
MQA was dead on arrival. We philes are 0.5% of the market, like SACD there just not enough mass interest to make it important for consumers to buy. Not saying it’s bad but just the facts philes cannot make another new format and go, it’s a small niche. My kids love portable music, earbuds, etc, they find my system boring to sit and listen to music and a whole LP to boot, that is another fact. Billions of downloads and streaming, compared to millions of CD and then below CD vinyl in sales, both physical formations don’t come near streaming when combined. That is the main market nowadays. When boomers die-off that is the end to high-end, we grew up with it and made it happen like owning hot-rods and muscle cars.
