Quote:
Originally Posted by cma29
You can get a Krell SACD Standard player for under $2,000. I had one and I really enjoyed its sound. However, these Krell players are getting dated now.
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Even the Cipher?
How does your Oppo compared to your Esoteric...or is there even any comparison?
Another issue that has been gnawing on me is having to settle for less than stellar performances/performers and artists I've never heard of in order to get a slight increase in sound quality. For instance, the Shostakovich 11th on BIS has amazing bass and dynamic range, and I generally liked the performance, but when I compared it to my Gennadi Rozhdestvensky version on JVC, which I had not listened to in a few years, the latter ate the BIS performance alive! The old Soviet recording is close and a bit coarse, but for me, the performance is more important. (Sticking with Shostakovich, I compared an RBCD and SACD of the 8th String Quartet this morning: the old Borodin Quartet pretty much trounces the Mandelring Qt! In stereo, there is not
that much difference in sound, either.) I think the Sony does some sort of upscaling, so maybe that's why RBCDs sound so good. I guess my point is that there is plenty of life left in older CDs! I'm going to scale back my frequent purchases of SACDs unless the music is rarely recorded and/or is a truly superior performance than one can find on RBCD.