I've had the Esoteric SA-50 for 6 months now and love it. By far the best CD player or SACD player I've used. I was hesitant at the price but now consider it an excellent value.
It is very flexible with the upsampling/filtering. I like to convert the CD/PCM stream to DSD, really sweet sounding digital. Much better than my prior efforts with various CD players (MoFi, others) and transport/DACs (Bel Canto, Benchmark, others).
SACD is great. It's Esoteric after all, they are pretty good at SACD.
The icing on the cake is the DAC inputs - toslink & RCA/coax. So I can feed my computer audio files and also a Squeezebox Touch for internet radio. Finally, this thing has got a volume attenuator so you can go direct to a power amp. But it sounds better through a pre-amp.
I did not have a chance to compare it to other Esoteric units, but I've been very pleased with the SA-50 - to the point of having no further upgraditis with regards to CD, SACD or DAC!
One drawback, the USB input is not a good implementation, so you need something else between PC and the SA-50, of which there are many different solutions to choose from.
Good luck, you can't go wrong.
It is very flexible with the upsampling/filtering. I like to convert the CD/PCM stream to DSD, really sweet sounding digital. Much better than my prior efforts with various CD players (MoFi, others) and transport/DACs (Bel Canto, Benchmark, others).
SACD is great. It's Esoteric after all, they are pretty good at SACD.
The icing on the cake is the DAC inputs - toslink & RCA/coax. So I can feed my computer audio files and also a Squeezebox Touch for internet radio. Finally, this thing has got a volume attenuator so you can go direct to a power amp. But it sounds better through a pre-amp.
I did not have a chance to compare it to other Esoteric units, but I've been very pleased with the SA-50 - to the point of having no further upgraditis with regards to CD, SACD or DAC!
One drawback, the USB input is not a good implementation, so you need something else between PC and the SA-50, of which there are many different solutions to choose from.
Good luck, you can't go wrong.