Post by dspgolf September 2, 2004 (1 of 7)
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What do you feel about the red book performance with this player? I have one and thimk it sounds a little thin on cd's. Not as good as Imight have hoped but amazing on sacd's.
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Post by tream September 2, 2004 (2 of 7)
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dspgolf said:
What do you feel about the red book performance with this player? I have one and thimk it sounds a little thin on cd's. Not as good as Imight have hoped but amazing on sacd's.
I also have one, but to be honest since acquiring it I have had it mostly on a diet of SACD's, which do sound awesome. What are you comparing it with, and what does the rest of your system look like? At the moment, I have a Bryston amp, B&W 804's, and Audioquest cables with the XA9000ES. 2 channel, but I plan to upgrade this system to mc soon-I have another MC system in a different of the house with a Sony carousel SACD player, Denon 4802 and NHT/Sunfire speakers. My old CD player is a Cal-Audio CL 20, once a Stereophile A rated component. My audio salesperson says I ought to keep it and run it as the CD front end when I set up the main MC system. OTOH, John Atkinson gave a good review of the XA9000ES on CD playback. As I have noted before, SACD's playing on my $200 Sony player sounded better than CD on the CL 20.
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Post by dspgolf September 2, 2004 (3 of 7)
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tream said:
I also have one, but to be honest since acquiring it I have had it mostly on a diet of SACD's, which do sound awesome. What are you comparing it with, and what does the rest of your system look like? At the moment, I have a Bryston amp, B&W 804's, and Audioquest cables with the XA9000ES. 2 channel, but I plan to upgrade this system to mc soon-I have another MC system in a different of the house with a Sony carousel SACD player, Denon 4802 and NHT/Sunfire speakers. My old CD player is a Cal-Audio CL 20, once a Stereophile A rated component. My audio salesperson says I ought to keep it and run it as the CD front end when I set up the main MC system. OTOH, John Atkinson gave a good review of the XA9000ES on CD playback. As I have noted before, SACD's playing on my $200 Sony player sounded better than CD on the CL 20.
I'm also running it two channel, a bryston 4b stpower amp, bryston bp 20 pre-amp and Energy Veritas 4.2i's speakers, with mit cables. The sacd's sound great, but the red-book cd's sound thin and not as good as I would have liked. Do you think that it might be my player? Should I look into getting a stand alone player just for cd's? Just bought the player about two weeks ago.
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I own the XA777ES which is supposed to be very close in sound. I noticed the CD layer was a little thin, but adding a premium power cord sweetened the sound quite a bit. It's a very honest presentation; I noticed that as long as recordings have a nice plummy warm acoustic to begin with, it comes across very well on the Sony. Distant, acoustically-stingy recordings don't. Believe me, I've done some hard listening. The advantage of Sony's no-frills presentation is that it handles climaxes very cleanly--unflappably in fact. If you buy a CD player with a warmer sound, unless you spend some big bucks, you will probably pay for that warmer sound with congested climaxes on those same plummy CDs.
I've been toying with the idea of a $3K CD only front end, but you know what? I'm giving my CDs a rest for awhile, and my wallet. Time is short and the tide of 'must have' SACDs hasn't flagged in months, for my tastes. I have a feeling that relatively expensive mid-fi CD only players will drop in price big time in the next few years.
I looked into having it modded with better caps, but there is no room. The XA9000ES is even more cluttered inside, if you're modding type!
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Post by Khorn September 3, 2004 (5 of 7)
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I also have a Sony, the SCD-1 and I am very satisfied with the Redbook CD performance. IMHO it reflects the sound that is recorded quite accurately and doesn't "embellish" the sound in any way. A well recorded and mastered disc sounds exactly like that. The SACD performance level is fantastic.
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Post by deangeli November 26, 2004 (6 of 7)
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Post by cafepeng November 27, 2004 (7 of 7)
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deangeli said:
Look here:
http://www.warrengregoire.com/
deangeli, from what I can gather, VSE do not modify the XA9000SE (or the XA3000ES which is not sold in Nth America). Not yet anyway.
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