As jafant is the original poster of this 199 page thread, and specifically asked me to comment here about my impressions of a disc player he purchased, I'll respond. I'm not hijacking the thread, or he's not telling me I'm not, but my long-winded reviews rarely get comments.
I auditioned the Marantz SA-11S2 for a month in 2009 as an open-box unit from Music Direct. For similar reasons to you: how a relatively expensive SACD player can sound, how the CD section sounds, how the transport sounds vs my own, and the overall impression given Marantz's reputation for build quality and SACD playback.
My primary comparisons were to my CD playback of a Madrigal-updated/upgraded and my slightly modded Proceed CDD transport via a Kimber D60 to my Great Northern Sound substantially (and cleverly) modified Bel Canto DAC2. SACD was compared to my Yamaha DVD-S1800 universal player: it plays SACD natively in DSD from laser to outputs so you do hear the purity of the format, but uses probably $10 of parts to do so for the 2-channel mix. I threw in my analog rig using the 'same' material as a reality check.
Michael Fremer did a full review of the unit for Stereophile and I remember agreeing with most of what he said (as I usually do), despite his requisite sugar-coating for the magazine.
In short, with CDs, there wasn't anything the Marantz did notably better than my rig, and a number of areas where it fell short.
With filters 1 & 2 I found CDs to sound slurred and muddy. Only 3 sounded OK. Compared to my stuff, the lower bass was amped-up; the mid-bass was slower, underdamped; slight differences through the midrange that didn't favor either; it was a draw in HF textural resolution, but the Bel Canto was better with HF decay naturalness. Soundstage width was about the same, but my rig did dimensionality better. My rig did the PRaT thing clearly better, but the Marantz didn't have its external clock option. The Marantz didn't have the speed, resolution, and clarity of my stuff, which matched the Marantz for smoothness, lack of grain, and freedom from long-term listening 'digital fatigue.' Overall, a warm frequency balance does not an 'analog-sounding' CD player make.
The player sounded marvelous with SACD. A mostly-different signal-processing path, but Marantz took advantage of the intrinsic advantages of DSD over PCM: very easy decoding, much higher resolution than redbook; the care in mastering the SACD layer; the smooooth sound of SACDs correlated with the smooth glossing over of CDs with their PCM decoding. At the time, my direct comparison was my universal player, which commits only sins of omission. The Marantz took the purity of native DSD of the Yamaha and put it through a good output section (at least) where the dynamics and details could and did shine through. But the bass was still bloated and slow. The soundstage wasn't nearly as holographic as I've heard from better and/or newer SACD players with the same discs. There was some resolution left on the table.
Their custom M-1 transport and SPDIF processing (digital out) was no better than my Proceed. Far worse, in that for my full audition period I always got a ton of read errors across a variety of discs that usually required power-cycling the unit.
The player was unnecessarily big and heavy, to justify its high end pretensions? The front panel ergonomics were awful, form over function. Why is the external clock selector on the front panel? Why isn't the polarity switch on the remote? Why is the power switch -- to be left on most of the time -- front and center? Why are the transport controls split 6" apart between the two sides of the raised center front panel? For such a big unit why is the display so tiny to be unreadable unless you're on top of it?
Granted, my Proceed (essentially a Mark Levinson No. 37) excels at ergonomics, display visibility, programming flexibility, responsive disc reads, but I wasn't willing to take a step backwards when the player as a whole did not do $3500 worth of improvements for me. Any, really.
I doubt that new opamps and replacing the 6 fuses is going to change the overall character of the player as I've described. If you got this for a few hundred bucks and have a bunch of SACDs, it may be worth it, but for MY sensibilities versus MY gear it was a disappointment. Twelve years later I know there are better units to be had for similar prices.
Be careful what you ask for from me! I now return you to your Thiel speaker forum...
