I heard the new 777ES SACD player

I attended the SACD panel discussion at the NYC Stereophile show. Here's the way that Sony explained their SACD introduction stategy: 1. Appeal to(and listen to) the audiophile community. 2. Have some software introduced for initial adopters of the format. 3. Introduce more reasonably priced players with surround capability for the general public. 4. As more SACD machines are sold, many more SACD titles will be released by Sony music along with releases from additional labels. 5. Sony is willing to license any manufacturer interested in introducing an SACD player.

It seems that Sony's two initial players were styled to appeal to high end sensibilities and now Sony is initiating their plan to make SACD a more mass market product. The features and styling of the new players(including the new 777ES)seem to support more mass market familiarity. Sony plans to have 14 different SACD players available by the end of the year- including DVD players and Dream System players with SACD playback capability. A salesman at Oade Brothers Electronics said that they expect at least 2000 SACD software titles to be available within a year.

Did Sony mention any plans for another high-end player? I hoping they'll put out something that loads faster but has superlative sonics.

At the panel discussion, David Kawakami of Sony said that he believes that SACD has gained enough momentum that the high end territory will be covered by the traditionally high end manufacturers. He believes that there will soon be other high end SACD players in addition to those from Accuphase, Classe and Marantz. It appears that Sony is ready to take SACD to a broader market and believes that the format is becoming mature enough for high end manufacturers to find the introduction of their own players to be viable. The impression I got from Mr. Kawakami is that Sony is now ready to stimulate a larger market for SACD which should lead to the introduction of players from other companies and software from additional labels. I listened to the new 777ES SACD player in the Sony demo several times and I was very impressed. I also listened to it in their display room on headphones and I was once again impressed. I timed the loading speed on the new 777 and it was down to about 8 seconds.

I have found that, all things being equal, true balanced outputs sound best in my system. Does this new Sony have them? The SCD-1 did....

I was also at the show in New York. There is no real way to know how the new 777 (or any of the other SACD players at the display) sounds, because the only way to listen to the players was through one of Sony's pathetically bad headphones, the MDR-CD2000.