Marantz SA-10 arriving Monday!

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.

astru

... the point of the settings is that the PCM format is not lossless ... there is no agreed way to reconstruct the original acoustic signal.

You must be confused. PCM is very much a lossless format. That doesn't mean it's perfect, but it is most certainly lossless.

You are saying that a discrete encoding using 16-bit resolution at 44KHz sampling rate of continuous signals from 0 to 20KHz is not lossless? You get quantization errors + you are guaranteed not to be able to recover perfectly the high frequencies. Please "unconfuse" me.