Marantz SA-10 arriving Monday!

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.

I believe the point of the settings is that the PCM format is not lossless, and Marantz provides the option to play with different settings because there is no agreed way to reconstruct the original acoustic signal. None of those settings work for DSD, which has "enough" resolution. In fact, I plan to try finding out which combination of settings on PCM comes as close as possible to DSD by using hybrid discs - but that’s a pretty substantial effort (for long winter evenings), and it will be recording-dependent most likely.

Elizabeth, if your unit is made for the US market then the XLR polarity follows the US standard: pin 2 is hot and pin 3 is cold. You should not reverse it. (BTW, phase and polarity are different things.) Also, except for dither, there is no "Off". You may keep Marantz default settings, but those do not provide the highest SNR, as they documented in the manual.