Beyond SACD with Redbook: Price No Object

I agree with A Sanctuary of Sound that the Audiomeca Mephisto II is one of the best CD player today.
I have been using the Mephisto II for 5 months and this player still makes me smile every night.

But SACD is too superior for any cd player if you play with the original DSD recording.

Even though i don't have a SACD player right now, i do have 6 SACD hybrid disc with original DSD recording which i'm going to use for the near future when i have some extra $$$$$ to buy the good SACD player.

Please don't make any negative comments anymore about the SACD and hopefully that SACD is not going to die as many people predict !

Please be honest that SACD with DSD recording is the second winner after the record !!

Good luck !

Jcbtubes,is there any pure DSD in your couple dozen of SACD discs ? Buy the Mark Levinson Vol.1 or Telarc Dave Brubeck and try it again ! If you still think and hear that your EMC 1 better than Marantz SA-1 .......??????

Amidst all this discussion, we should remember that many SACD-CD comparisons have been made with Redbook CD masters remastered in SACD, which is hardly the same thing as comparing CD to true DSD-recorded music. I'd go so far as to say that unless a given "tester" specifies that he or she used real DSD mastered SACDs, we cannot assume the comparison was between true SACD and Redbook PCM. The PCM master limits the quality of the DSD remaster even before it is made.

Another point, possibly more important. PCM is a technology that engineers have been refining for over 20 years. It's improved greatly over the years and for that I am grateful. However, at this stage the theoretical limits of the technology are being reached. Improvements are tiny little steps; real, but tiny. DSD, however, is still in its infancy and we can look forward to many years of improvement and refinement.

It's perfectly sensible to want a top-shelf player for CD, since we all have a lot of great music locked up in our PCM CDs that we want to enjoy, but as native DSD recordings become more available, CD will gradually be left further and further behind.

That's my take on it, at least for now.

Happy listening all!

Joel.

I have to agree with JcbTubes - I too owned the Marantz SA-1 and while it is a great player felt it had a level of detail that was "in your face" on SACDs. Redbook was just okay. I then purchased an EMC-1 MkII and thought it was a bit better. Ultimately I settled on the Mephisto II which doesn't immediately present itself as being better, instead it seduces and captivates you over time and honestly becomes quite addictive. Scary! There is something that the Mephiso does which is different than any other player I've heard. Its virtues are not in hyper-detail but the way the music simply envelops you with that certain delicacy - the layered soundstage - depth between the speakers - texture... it really is amazing and I prefer that character to any SACD recording on ANY SACD player.

Gendut: SACD is detailed and seems to have more spacial information than ordinary Redbook. But... if you listen closely to your Mephisto compared to an SACD player, you will find that SACDs (as played by most current units) are simply not involving. The Sony XA777ES comes close to making this better however. Sony took a step back with this unit and seems to have tried to acheive a more "analog" presentation vs. hyper detail. This helps to make the SACDs sound a bit more involving but makes the gap between well recorded redbook and SACD seem much, much smaller.

Sugarbrie - I think someone like George Lucas has been playing with a lot of the recordings. Take a look at Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. How many times has that baby been re-issued? And now in Multi-Channel??

I have made a direct side by side of my heavily modified Sony SCD-1 to the Mephisto II. My SCD-1 with full Audiocom modifications is well beyond the Mephisto II in redbook, SACD is another level still. Do not forget how often people said cd would fail, then vinyl was dead.
If you want to believe in your up-sampled 16 bit for $$$$$ fine, if you have an open mind to what is possible, then SACD is here!
A side note, I was playing My SACD hybrid Alison Krauss "Forget About It" for a friend the other night. He was in heaven and I was squirming. It was flat and lifeless. The glow and shimmer of the strings was gone, the depth of her voice and the image of her chest and throat were missing. I was so unhappy with what I heard I stopped the player and turned up the lights to see if something was messed up. Turns out I forgot to switch to SACD, once again I returned to nirvana. If people don't hear the greatness of SACD, they simply are not able to hear.