Marantz SA-10 arriving Monday!

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)

All these different setting combinations seem to me like a cop-out on the part of the designer.  Surely the goal is to design and manufacture a machine as faithful to the original signal as possible; one presumes one setting combination comes closer to that than all the others.  Their inclusion seems like putting a parametric equalizer on a preamp.