Ayre C 5xe Universal vs. Cary 306 SACD

You are still charming the masses with your two faced 2 dollar Bill..Most of us are Not Ignorant to your previous incarnate as Wc65Mustang. Tom

To the audiodweeb: always nice to hear from you.

Always nice to hear from the TWO of you as well..One post covers TWO Bills. A certain gain of efficiency wouldn't you concur twice, in your singular mind, Bill/Bill?..Tom

I have Cary 306 SACD for 2 month now with 800 hour on it.
I have not hear the Ayre.
I use it with Calypso(with mullard 10M 12ax7) and JC-1 power amp, harbeth HL-5, alpha core cable.
the Cary red book sound so good to the point I am so emotionally envolved that I normally sit there for 4 hour every night until my wife get mad at me. I used to have sony sacd xa-9000ES with $1500 mod from referenceaudiomod which they claimed it will make the sony beat any player on the shelf.
the thing is,Cary beat it by a wide margin. the mod did make sony sound better but not enough.
I also have a vpi scout with blackbird cartidge and a class A phono pre-amp. I have Holy cole "don't smoke in bed" CD and LP, I just love the CD on cary over the LP on vpi.

SACD sound much better provided that it use the lastest recording technique(like the Yo-Yo-Ma solo)

Well, it looks like this thread finally picked up some traction. Nice to see.

On a side note...does anybody know if you can program individual tracks into the Ayre C 5xe for just those tracks to be played back? I need this capability for recording down to a Marantz DR-17 recorder. I know the Cary 306 SACD will do this already.

I also second the motion to have those users who have had the direct comparison experience to report on the Ayre/Cary differences specifically on Red Book, HDCD, and SACD. I am way more interested in Red Book performance because that's what I own more of and will also likely have access to in the future.

So, what's up, guys? CD, HDCD, and SACD. Break it down for us, please, in relationship to these players.