to SACD or not

Love my EMM CDSA-SE (~ $5,500 used)- reviews are spot on. More natural sounding than my friend's Esoteric P-03/D-03 combo... The only other machine I would consider at a similar price point would be the Marantz SA-7S1 (~ $3k used) with mods by Jena Labs (~ $2K) for total of $5k... Above that it takes BIG $$$ to beat these machines IMO... **Caveat- this is for SACD ONLY. On Redbook, my battery p/s modded 47 Labs Flatfish transport and Audio Note 3.1x Balanced Dac betters the EMM...

as much as i believe the sony 5400 is a good player, and the modwright upgrade is a good idea as well, i will never understand how anyone can confidently state that "it takes months" for something to break in. i've just never bought anything that took a great deal of time to sound differently than day one. maybe day 3 or day 7... even two weeks perhaps.

I have a Denon 5910ci and a Ayre C5xe-mp and there is no comparision between the two. I only use the denon for 5.1 SACD and DVD-A which is rare. Based on your budget you have a number of options, but one question, do have any discs? I have a few and sometimes I think I would have been beter invested in buying the LP's and staying with redbook. But I will add for redbook the Ayre does a great job as well.

get a turntable
vpi classic

I have an Exemplar Denon 5910 (a Denon 5910 extensively modified by John Tucker including conversion to tube output, silver wire, better caps and clock, etc). Until very recently, I had an Ayre C-5xe which I sent back to Ayre for the MP upgrade. Before the MP upgrade, the Exemplar was much better than the Ayre. After the MP upgrade the two players were very close, although different. The tubes give the Exemplar a bigger soundstage with a richer, fuller sound & it brings out the power in the music. The Ayre is much cleaner sounding with less distortion, tighter bass, lower noise floor, more low level detail.

I recently bought an Ayre DX-5, which in addition to CD, SACD, DVD-A, also has a USB input to serve as a DAC for a music server (I'm using a modified 2010 Mac Mini (8 GB RAM, SSD, and linear power supply) with a Locus Design Nucleus USB cable) and it plays blu ray and DVD video as well. I bought it mainly for the USB input and the blu ray video capability, expecting only an incremental improvement in sound quality over the C-5xeMP. I was very wrong. It is a whole lot better than the C-5xeMP and is also better than the Exemplar (though the Exemplar still has that big soundstage and rich, full sound). I have never heard digital sound anywhere near as good as it sounds with the DX-5. It does some things better than my vinyl rig and really narrows the gap between digital and analog. When fed from the Mac Mini with the files loaded into RAM Disc and played through Ayre's Airwave application instead of iTunes, the sound is so distortion-free, fast and right there in the room, it seems almost real.

If your budget goes up to $10K, you should consider the DX-5.