Replacing SONY XA9000ES SACD/CD Player- Suggestions for Comparable Sound?

I think you will be very pleased with the sound.

 

I've had a Sony 5400ES for five years and have never had any problems. I just sold it in order to help finance my new Esoteric K-03. I'd recommend it, but it's vastly more expensive than the OP's price limit!

 

I look forward to your comments on the sound. Hope it works out well for you.

 

The 5400 is now hard to find, at least at a reasonable price.

Were you able to locate one?

 

There was a used one on this board that just sold.

 

You bought mine!!!

 

Indeed I did.

Small world.

Thank you again.

 

unless you have a large collection of SACDs ,its silly to buy a cd player nowadays ,for that money you can get a nice streamer (player,ect)

 

Sorry to hear you are having issues with your player, no fun. I haven't owned one of the Sonys, but I did have a 5k McIntosh all-round disc spinner that was supposed to be great - and it was when it worked - but actually was mostly a PITA. I replaced it with the Oppo 105 for less than one third the price and never looked back. The Oppo is better made, better supported, more reliable, and mostly just sounds about 10x better than what it replaced.

My belief is that digital transports, unless you are into serious bucks, are a commodity piece at this time. My own strategy for here is to buy the one that is the best band for the buck and spend my $$$ on software.

Oops, I guess I should have read all the way through

Glad the OP found a solution, I'll leave this here for what it's worth.

 

Nice, but that's not what this thread is about.

 

I think someone on this group bought the sony ,I wonder what he thinks of it ,what good is rebuying something out of date (not if you play a lot of sacds)

 

1) It might be "out of date" but the overwhelming consensus is that it outperforms far more expensive players.
2) It upsamples RBCDs to give near-SACD sound quality.

 

I didn't mean the Player

 

Wish I'd bought one (the 5400) when I had the chance

 

The 5400 is a great player but prices have gotten fairly high on the aftermarket for it. That Yamaha mentioned earlier in the thread is a viable alternative if it is still hanging around list price.

 

Bought this player as it is said, by several venerable memebers, to sound great, perhaps as good or better than the 9000, which has great sound when working properly. The 5400 does not have the playback issue which plagues my 9000. Whether or not it is out of date is not really important to me. It is in fact newer than the 9000.

I do, in fact, have a large sacd collection & listen to sacds often, so a performing, good sounding sacd player is important to me.

 

What about the Teac players?

(Sorry, I'm drifting off topic...this is a Sony 9000 thread)

 

If I were really, really serious about SACD, I'd buy a cheap Blu-ray player that can output DSD over HDMI, and then use either a receiver or some other outboard D/A converter that was capable of converting it to analog. That way you decouple the transport - which is a commodity item - from the D/A converter, which is where the real engineering happens and what gives the system its sound.

I'm not as serious about DSD, so I'm just using a cheap Sony Blu-ray that converts DSD to 24/192 PCM, and sends it to my h/k receiver for D/A conversion. Someday, I'll upgrade the receiver to something more impressive, although it sounds good enough for mass market gear.

 

Really?

I never knew that. To which rate does it upsample?

 

I can't provide an exact number, but I have read several references to the fact that it does upsample (apparently there is a "secret" whitepaper on the net that details it), but here is part of a post from SACD.net that addresses the issue:

"I obtained the design white paper from Sony regarding the XA5400ES... As a side note, this paper should have been peer-reviewed as it contains many contradictory statements, and hints to the player having multichannel analog outputs, which it doesn't. However, it clearly states that CD upsampling is performed by the DAC IC, the DSD1796 from Burr Brown. The datasheet for this IC is available here.
As one can see in the datasheet page 8, the CD upsampling filter is a "regular" half band FIR filter; recent developments in digital filtering points to the pre-echo of that type of filter to being detrimental to sound quality, in particular sibilance (countless papers available on the AES). There are several alternative approaches to fix this issue: one of them is to use IIR filters instead of FIR, at the cost of a lot of phase distortion. Another approach is to use a "minimum phase" transform FIR filter, which translates the traditional symmetrical impulse response to asymmetrical at the cost of some phase distortion. This enables the designer to trade off pre-echos and phase to the optimal blend. The results are quite evocative, with better high-frequency extension and integration, especially when vocals are recorded with a large amount of high-frequency content. This filtering technique is in use in the Wolfson WM8741 DAC, but also in some outboard DACs such as the Cambridge Audio MagicDAC II (in conjuction with Anagram Technology Q5 upsampler), where the user can select his favorite upsampling method."

 

I didn't see where the original poster said he didn't have a lot of SACDs. He had the 'XA9000ES for eight years, so one could easily surmise that he has some SACDs. Even if he doesn't, he probably has a lot of CDs that he could still play, and with many SACDs released in the past few years and with more titles to come, it is not too late to get into SACD.

As for music servers, like we have discussed a hundred bazillion times, downloads aren't for everyone, and there is no way I am going to take the time to rip thousands of my CDs to build up a music server.

I have a Sony SCD-XA5400ES and use it several times a week (as my busy schedule allows). It is not out of date. I have discs, it plays discs. Frankly, your position that such a player is outdated is insulting. New CDs and SACDs are being released all the time, and many of us have invested in collections and play these discs.

These threads are not a place for people to remind us that music servers exist. We know about them.

Your position has nothing to do with this thread topic. The original poster had a disc player die and wanted a new disc player. He just bought a new one. End of story.

 

You said that before ,and I still don't understand ,You don't have time? How is ripping a cd any different time wise to playing a cd ,in fact its faster ,Of course the big problem with ripping cds is sacd

 

It's not that simple. There is no dedicated DAC on the market that can receive a DSD signal over HDMI.

Home theatre receivers are usually not in the same league sonically as stereo amplifiers of the same price.

The only way to hear SACDs in optimum sound without a high quality SACD player is to rip them with a modded PS3 and to play the SACD rips with a DSD DAC. But that's not nearly as convenient as ripping a CD collection.

 

That's a surprise. You'd think by now somebody would have released such a unit.

The cheap Sony Blu-ray players convert to 24-bit / 176 PCM from what I've read online. If someone has a small collection of SACDs that might be sufficient. The big advantage to an outboard DAC is that the quality is usually really high, and you don't have to throw it away just because the transport goes bad...

You also get to use it with other high-res sources, like downloads...

 

The problem is the licensing tarifs for HDMI, which are more suited to home theatre equipment manufacturers which sell large quantities, while audiophile DACs are made by mostly smaller companies.