Review: Sony SCD-XA5400ES CD Player

Dave----Your review of Sony xa5400es convinced me to buy it to replace a dying Marantz. Your opinion and a $1039 plus shipping price. What a revelation this piece is. Extraordinary detail and spot on resolution but, more than anything else, musicality. It never sounds colored in any way. It simply never sounds digital. At about 3-400 hrs in I notice very little if any change. This was stellar out of the box. Please let us know what the modded unit sounds like. I needent encourage you to specificity as we can always expect and get that from you. I gently remind all who have parsed specs that one of the most if not THE most respected reviewers in Stereophile, Kalman Rubinson, called it the best CD player he's yet heard with price not a consideration. My equipment: Vincent SV236MkII integrated, all signal cable cabling, Legacy Classic HDs and, of course, the Sony. Can't wait to hear about the Modwright mods.

Nice system Gregfey! I'll be sure to post my review after a thorough listen with all genre of music.

Tube designs have their followers, nostalgia and a belief by many that the tube sound is in some way better because it gives a warmer presentation; at the end of the day personal preferences will always apply, but for those of us who over many years followed technology and its advances feel that the many disadvantages of tube technology, no longer represents a level playing field against solid state. Here are some of the major reasons; To produce a first class tube amplifier capable of driving many of the modern multiway speakers, you are looking at an almost prohibitive cost of decent transformers, which include heavy chokes, expensive coupling capacitors and high voltage resistors, then this amplifier from the first day of switch on will be changing its characteristics as the tubes settle then age, so that in order to maintain its distortion levels a regular balance check will be required of the output devices. If you are a regular listener then of course tube replacement will become mandatory fairly regularly and then there is the heat issue. The distortion from tubes is mainly second harmonic which is less irritating to the listener but still suffers a level some fifty to one hundred times that of solid state, some tube designs do not even meet the IEC Hi-Fi standard for distortion at 0.25% or more, which will get worse as tubes age, some designs have now down away with feedback altogether, resulting in very low damping factors, again failing the IEC standard. Most tube designs are still largely the same as those early efforts from Mullard and Brimar so there is a limit to what can realistically be achieved in future design; By contrast solid state has hundreds of variations and technically are regarded as blameless, and for an equivalent cost to the tube would produce an amplifier of superb performance, distortion down to 0.002% damping factor up to 100+ compact size, powerful and trouble free, no competition whatever from tubes... Thats your choice!!!!

Who are you talking too disbeliever? This post is in regards to the Sony XA5400ES/Modwright CDP. Some of what you say is true, however, having an intelligently designed tube circuit utilized on the front end of a system can provide for a far more realistic and organic listening experience. I've sat 2 ft from an alto sax/piano/bass trio and I can tell you that an entirely SS system will not reproduce that melt you into your chair feeling. The sax was so sonorous and burnished that it simply made love to my ears....the Modwright XA5400ES get's me real close to that sound.

Good for you