Marantz SA-10 arriving Monday!

@milpai @jafant thanks. yes I plan to share comparison of my digital gears.

A few things I found out during the first day of use. I’ve tried USB A and B inputs, coax not yet. SA-10 sounds the best when I play CD or SACD using its transport.

When playing from USB thumb drive (SA-10 USB A input), it must be formatted as FAT32. For sizes > 32GB, it needs to be formatted using third party utilities, not Windows. 1 problem with playing from USB thumb drive is that SA-10 does not support gapless playback. There is relay click between each file/track.

I tried Sony HAP-Z1ES hard disk player into SA-10 USB B input. No problem with gapless playback. Curious USB Cable is used. I still don’t understand why it sounds inferior compared to playing CD/SACD directly on SA-10. I also purchase high res music online and save into Sony’s HDD so this is something I need to fix.

anwar,
What DAC were you using prior to the SA-10?

@roxy54 I started with Ayon CD-07, then tried Sony HAP-Z1ES internal DAC, not happy as Ayon sounds better.  Both of them use Burr Brown 1796 DAC.  Then I purchased Denafrips Terminator R2R DAC 4 months ago, using Sony as a player with USB Audio connection.

Hello, hap-z1es with firmware 18120r support sa-10？
Are you using latest firmware also? Thank you

I do not see any new firmware for SA-10 on the Marantz website. Could you please elaborate on the firmware?

I got to play a little bit with the sound settings. (I can confirm that they only work on CD/PCM signal and not on SACD/DSD signal.) Some findings (in my system and to my ears):
Filter 2 sounds more natural overall, with better instrument attack. Although they say it would be brighter than Filter 1 and I complained about some brightness, I do not find that to be true in my system; maybe a little bit the opposite. Filter 1 increases the sound density; to a degree, it sounds more pleasant, but I feel that it is a coloring of the sound.
I ended up keeping the Dither 1 setting, but it was difficult to make a difference/choice between 1 and Off; setting 2 was not to my liking.
I changed NoiseShaper to setting 4th-1. I do agree that the sound stage seems a little tighter with 3th-1, especially by pinpointing vocals, but my Luxmans and the KEFs are already doing a fantastic job with the sound stage and I preferred the slightly perceived increase in overall sound definition of 4th-1.
These findings may be highly dependent on the source. My test discs were:
- Diana Krall: Turn Up the Quiet
- Katty Perry: MTV Unplugged
- Adam Cohen: We Go Home
- Dorati/London Symphony: Enesco’s Romanian Rhapsody 1 and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies 1-6 (I can see some people preferring Filter 1 on this CD because instruments sound a little richer with that setting)