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!
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!