Music Hall Maverick SACD Player?

I have seen pictures and I have to say there is a definitely a strong family resemblence between it and the Music Hall MMF-25 CD player. The Maverick is somewhat more attractive - taller, more substantial looking, pewter in color as opposed to silver. Think of the progression up the line of the Music Hall turntables in terms of looks.

And, like Rar1's link points out, a $1500 price point.

Based on my experience with the MMF-25, this player should definitely sound very good. In fact, I consider the MMF-25 THE budget player of today, performance not very far off a reference quality player. The upsampling of the Maverick would be welcome.

My only question would be, does this player represent value at $1500? I first would need to know that it sounds as good as any other $1500 CD player, which based on the MMF25's performance(can't think of a player under $1000 I'd rather own), it ought to. SACD would carry less importance to me, but my experience with my SACD player shows me the format's superiority to CD.

I heard the Maverick at the San Francisco HE Show. It sounded nice, but it wasn't the best environment for judgment. There were about 30 people in the same tiny Music Hall room.

Here's a photo of it from the HE:

http://www.geocities.com/mikehu27/musichall.jpg

(I think it's a sweet looking CD player.)

It sure looks like a Shanling. I don't know why Music Hall would change products to import when they have had such good luck with the MMF-25.

The Music Hall MMF-CD25 is just a relabeled Shanling CD-S100. I opened both of them to modifiy and its clear as day.

The Usher CD100 is very similar to these as well, but we noticed they had done some light tuning inside with better grade caps and different values and this unit sounds much better than the music hall cd-25/shanling.