SACD Players

@risammie

The beauty of going with PS Audio, is that they are one of a very few who can transfer the DSD layer from their transport to their upgradable DAC.  Most others have to use a built in DAC that can be of poor quality.

All the best.

@rlsammie I understand that you have gone down the Mcintosh route, but I’d like to comment for others wishing to go down the SACD path.

First thing to be aware of is that most SACDs contain both muti-channel and two-channel (stereo), as well as a completely separate CD layer. Many "audiophile" SACD players only play two-channel stereo so are quite restrictive. I personally do not believe in the argument that because we only have two ears, we cannot hear surround sound, let alone the immersive sound now available on Blu-Ray with even more channels (eg Dolby Atmos).

One route is to buy a universal player which can play (most) silver disks including CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K and SACD. Manufacturers like Panasonic do not want to pay royalties to Sony for SACD, but that is not an issue for Sony. The cheapest Sony universal player starts at about A$250, or for about 10 times as much you get into Reavon and Magnetar. The latter pair are built around the same System on a Chip (SoC) as defunct Oppos, hence the familiar menu structure.

I have Marantz, Sony and Reavon universal players which all play multi-channel and stereo SACD. The Marantz and Reavon have both digital (HDMI) and analogue outputs. I mainly feed a Marantz 8800A AV Preprocessor which has 8 very high quality two-channel DACs.

Astonishingly, the Reavon 200 has one DAC for CD playback and another for multi-channel analogue playback. Neither of these DACs is state-of-the-art. Worse yet, the SACD playback is down-converted to CD quality so you lose all the benefits of Direct Stream Digital (DSD). This is clearly audible!

The saving grace is that you can effectively use the Reavon 200 as a transport, passing DSD over HDMI, just like the far cheaper Sony. My Marantz does a superb job of decoding the DSD!

The Reavon is available without analogue outputs but with SACD playback as the 110 model at a much lower cost. I am not sure if there is an impact on video quality. Anyway, hope this helps somebody

@curiousjim 

Agreed and It's the same with MCT500 transport. They key here is that both the transport and DAC needs to be from the same manufacturer. 

@richardbrand 

I am with you. I also have a Sony Blue-ray player connected to my home theater system that supports DSD multilayer. With the HDMI out from the Blue-ray player I am able to enjoy multichannel music. However, my home theater system fairly basic and is not my reference audio system. 

@rlsammie I only have one system for both music and video ;-(. Probably the only Dolby Atmos capable system in the world with no center channel!

There are some seriously good Atmos sound recordings available too. If you like classical then Norwegian label 2L at www.2l.no has some stunning disks. In my opinion, they are world leaders in how to do digital properly. Elsewhere, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in Atmos is amazing.

For others embarking on the high-resolution disk journey, HDMI can be used to mix and match transports and DACs from different manufacturers, and supports high resolution audio including multi-channel DSD and Atmos. Mcintosh is an exception, and the MCT500 SACD transport is 2-channel only!