Is there an SACD that can play cds well?

Excellant review Albert, I've found on my SCD-1 that the filters make a very distinct difference. I set-up by musical type, small jazz and vocal on filter 2 (my favorite) Classical on standard, large jazz on 4, rock on 1 or 4. My biggest problem is I'll forget to check and halfway into a disk I begin losing interest, if I figure it out the whole presentation becomes pleasing again once I switch filters. I'm glad you mentioned the filters, I know when I first began using with my player, it was the filters that I felt were the breakthrough in technology, and hopefully more choices become avalible or at least studied. Thanks again for the great job! J.D.

Many thanks to Albert and others here, for the efforts they have put in to sharing their very valuable insights with these players. I suspect many of us will now be able to act with more confidence on the new SACD players.

do we need a DAC with SCD-1? and does sony has its own DAC or we need to add external DAC?

Dynamics, to answer your question in short - No. However, both Sony's SCD-1 (or Marantz's SA-1) has two digital outputs in RCA and TOSLINK. However, these outputs are for PCM only which means that you can only play redbook CDs with them. Accuphase uses a proprietary standard to connect their own SACD drive and DAC and I doubt if anyone else would support it. My conclusion is, if you buy the SCD-1 or SA-1, you don't really want to use a DAC since the built-in DAC are quite good. But then, no one would stop you if you insist on buying a dCS Purcell/Elgar combo.

I find it funny that no one has mentioned the relatively dismal quality of the Sony SCD-1's analogue output stage. Compared with the rest of the player, the components used for this stage are surprisingly pedestrian. I have the Marantz SA-1, because I felt it had slightly more transparency and tonal accuracy compared to the SCD-1, but a friend had his SCD-1's analogue output stage replaced with high grade components and I don't think I've ever heard anything sound so real.