SACD vs RBCD players

The McIntosh MCD500 is a gorgeous sounding SACD/Redbook player. The best I have heard. Add to that the fact you can use the ESS Sabre DACS inside the player for other sources and you have a must buy unit.

The Ayre C-5xe, especially with the new MP upgrade, is excellent with both SACD and RB. In fact, it clearly shows that some well-recorded titles sound better than many SACDs. But the best SACDs played on it are something to treasure.
The C-5xe will also play DVD-Audio discs, some of which are really good, but it struggles with the DVD-A menu.

The Exemplar and APL modded Denon 5910s and 3910s will play all discs except blu-rays and in some ways are better than the non-MP C-5xe.

If you want to stick with just RB, the Ayre C-7xe, especially with the MP upgrade, is phenominal for the money.

Hope this helps.

I feel that SACD is a worthwhile improvement over RBCD. A lot has to do with the mastering process though. I have heard a few RBCD's that come close and a couple even surpass some SACD's. I would not really worry about a SACD player sounding inferior on RBCD, as that is simply the difference one hears generally speaking between these formats. My highly modified Marantz SA-11S1 sounds very good on RBCD and excellent on SACD.........for digital anyway. Analog is still my primary source, but I find digital at least enjoyable now, especially SACD.

BTW, you may find this site useful as to what recordings are availible on SACD.

Cheers,
John

Great discussion going here with lots of excellent suggestions! Maybe my initial comment of SACD being "vastly superior" was slightly overboard, but I have to stick with it... In my experience, SACD always sounds better in absolute terms than RBCD. I'm a big believer in subjective listening, but there are times that the engineering and physics behind a product simply hold up in practice. Since the sampling rate of SACD is so much higher than that of Red Book, it will always have the advantage of holding more information. No matter how much you want to oversample, reclock, and process the RBCD stream, it's just not going to hold the same amount of info as SACD.

It's true that the catalog of titles is somewhat limited in relation to the mainstream, but there are excellent sources for SACD like Acoustic Sounds, Elusive Disk, Amazon and Arkiv Music. If you're looking for clssical stuff, Arkiv even has an entire section of their online catalog dedicated to SACD, so it's easy to find what's available. I've purchased SACD form all of the above and haven't been disappointed yet. How long SACD will survive has yet to be seen, but there are still LOTS of titles out there to be had... I'll keep buying them up and enjoying them as long as I can!

So, it's obvious that I'm a big believer in the format. For me, a player has to have good SACD capability. There are plenty of fine examples out there at all kinds of price points both new and used: Marantz, Esoteric, Denon, Onkyo, dcs, NAD, Lexicon, Oppo, Sony.... You're best bet is to find a player that keeps the SACD data stream in the DSD domain and doesn't internally convert the data stream to PCM. I use a Sony 999ES and use it's analog outputs to run SACD's direclty to my preamp. I use the digital output to run through a DAC for RBCD's, so I get the best of both worlds with one deck.

Hope all of this helps. Have fun in your search and most of all, sit back, relax and enjoy the music!

The following is not really an argument against SACD, because the format is slowly growing and SACD players play RBCDs as well, however I'm trying to gain a realistic idea of how much use I will truly get from a SACD player.

There appear to be roughly 6000 SACDs available in print. While the SACD format is superior to RBCD, this still does not affect a few other variables. The first is the quality of the performance and the second is musical taste. Once we eliminate the type of music that I do not like, and eliminate the discs with less than excellent performances and finally eliminate the discs that are really just mediocre recording quality ( and offer little to no improvement over RBCD ) I begin to suspect that the number of SACDs I would listen to on a regular basis might not be that many.

To those of you who own SACD players, how many SACDs do you own and what percentage of those do you really listen to on a regular basis?