The current SOTA SACD player

Well done Brent!

Hi Jonathan, Brent, Mike, Grant and Alex.
All the above I know personally and consider friends with a common interest in high end audio. I don't want to belabor this but would like to comment on it.
I think Ecka's comment above is well put and I'd like to add that in the early days of consumer EMM SACD players (not too long ago), the Philips 1000 was modded by EMM and used as the transport as a temporary solution until their own transport was ready. We all know what happened. They went dead and couldn't be fixed. Alex to the resue! Not only did he identify the problem, but he was the only one in the WORLD that could fix it. I know, he fixed two different units for me after I was told that they could't be fixed. He's really a brilliant engineer but has such a high passion for audio that maybe we should lock him in a closet for awhile :-). Anyway, because of the Philips problem Alex came into contact with many EMM owners. I referred several myself. That association along with EMM considered the worlds best by many set a goal for Alex to shoot for so I can understand his interaction with EMM owners.
Thanks to people like Ed, Andreas, Alex and others, we as audiophiles are reaping the benefits. Digital is getting better all the time and I would like to encourage them all to KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!

Frank

Ecka
I have the same EMM combo like yours, and also dCS and also Zanden and a few others ; to briefly answer your question , I bought what is called APL 2.5 ( the TEAC UX1 ltd heavily modified by Alex ) and in my system ( ALE compression drivers) , my room ( acoustically treated to match my equipment and my type of music) , and to my ears (and several others , known for theirs') it was better than the rest, simply more natural in recreating the original magic illusion , a special blend of smoothness and detail.
Certainly Alex is not an easy or average character , but assasinating his won't help the quest for better sound, with the possible exception of pampering some ego larger than ...well, pardon my French, private parts of some individuals
Having said that, EMM and the others mentioned are fantastic machines as well, and I couldn't listen so far to the Signature version which has rave reviews.

Fascinating discussion as usual. . . yet, I am still convinced that the BEST player in the world has not been built, and likely never will be. What is one audiophile's Nirvana, is most often than not another one's audio Purgatory. . . or actuall audio Hell, in my case, when I listened to one particular system, both digital and analog, from a European brand mercifully not mentioned in this thread! MAKSHACK, I discovered at the Denver Audiofest last week that you are not the only one to get heart palpitations when listening to nasty sounding aledgedly SOTA equipment. This thing was so grating that it made me long nostalgically for the brutal but honest enharmonic shriek of the high-speed drill of my dentist, when only two weeks ago he trapanated into my broken top-left incisor tooth with the aid of a diamond-tip.

Conversely, both the NWO-2.5 and the EMM Sig I heard in Denver sounded reasonably acceptable to my ears, if not exactly overwhelming.

Guido:

the (...) enharmonic shriek of the high-speed drill of my dentist

LOL!
OTOH, how does the drill do midbass frequencies (or do you switch drills)..