Best CD sound: Marantz SA8001 or Rega Apollo?

I'm very interested in this question too. So far, there doesn't appear to be any published review of the SA 8001. I recently e-mailed John Atkinson and he confirmed that Stereophile has obtained a unit and that the review is provisionally scheduled to be published in Sept. or Oct.

I decided not to wait and picked up a demo SA 8001 from audio advisor. Sure beats the old Rotel RCD 951 I was using, but I'm still curious whether the REga would be an upgrade.

By the way, the Marantz did NOT sound very good right out of the box. Very crispy. But the sound warmed up considerably after I left it running for about a week.

And not to beat a dead horse, but the Benchmark people claim to have proved that their DAC can correct for any timing problems coming from the source. In other words, they claim it makes no difference whether you feed it from a CD transport or from a computer. Again, this is something that could easily be verified. If it's true for the Benchmark DAC, there's not reason it couldn't be true for the DAC in a CD player.

I'm responding to 4est.

I think you're being a bit extreme. I used a borrowed Benchmark DAC with my computer audio files and was quite pleased with the sound. But I'm not sure that it bettered the SA 8001, which costs slightly less. (The Benchmark definitely has a better headphone amp, though, than the headphone output of the Marantz.)

This is the sort of thing, by the way, where it would be very easy, and I think helpful, to do some blind testing. Many CD players have a DAC input, so one could compare the sound of a CD in the player with the sound of the same recording playing back from a computer into the DAC. If retrieving data from a CD in real time is really such a problem, it should be audible.