Marantz SA-10 arriving Monday!

I have a PS Audio p1000. I use it for everything except my amp.

Thanks Elizabeth. That makes sense.

@blueranger I would very much recommend for your continued good hearing not listening for hours at 100db.

I have a PS Audio P1000 power regenerater that is hooked up to everything except my amp which is plugged in the wall. I have always loved my music loud. I do wear earmuffs while I mow the yard. Lol. About the db levels. I switched 4 months ago from an iphone 6 to an LG V30 and sticking with the same app Decible X the levels seem to be 6-9 dbs louder on the V30. 

I have read the Maggie's sound good at low volume. Good choice for apartments. The OHM 5000's do need some volume to sound their best. I also wonder if all frequencies of sound are equally damaging to hearing. Because now everything is cleaner and clear so not much ear fatigue.

I wish I hadnt sold my old rat shack meter on eBay back in 06. Im gifting my son my old Bryston amp ,preamp 8005 player. He only has to buy speakers and Maggie's is one I suggested to him since he is in an apartment.

And that they are excellent speakers from what I have heard, Ive read people that sell theirs sometimes end up buying another pair.

Yes I have a P1000. About my system sounding shrill 10 days ago. What ever cold it had it cured itself or I helped it. I waited 6 days  to post here to make sure it was still sou,ding excellent. When I first got the SA-10 I PUT ONE OF MY 2 VPI bricks (it's a black hole for stray electronic fields) on top near its transformer. I immediately wrote a post about it being the best digital I had ever heard. Then a week after that it had what I call digititus, sounding thin and shrill. I was dumbfounded. I then realized I had moved my VPI brick to the preamp!! I out it back on the player and it sounded much much better!!! I cannot fathom a well designed player like mine being vulnerable to electrical field anomalies. So my hypothesis is that it's heavy weight damped the chassis. Or my system was still in the break in stage and regressed. Or I had unplugged my power cords and that dissipated any static. I just know now my player sounds fantastic. Elizabeth, do you have any tweaks done on your player?

Oh one more thing. I blew a fuse on the preamp and  replaced it with the same make. Has anyone noticed after a fuse change that their stereo sounds different?

Does anyone remember the original Bright Star Little Rock?  I think I still have one somewhere.  The are VPI bricks more effective?

I placed it a little to the left over the transformer at first then I put it front and centered over the transport. I haven't took it off. I'm in the camp if it isn't broke don't fix it. I think it might help more with damping. I know it just sounds wonderful now. One reason I bought it among many others is your praise of it here

I also unplugged it from one if the active regenerator receptacles to one of 2  passive filter ones on the P1000.

The Bright Star Little Rock and VPI Brick, as it turns out, were not competitors. On the other hand, once upon a time Barry of Bright Star and I were competitors, but not in a bad way.

blueranger
Hope you are dialing in the SA-10 this Labor Day Weekend.  Happy Listening!

I'm away today but plan on giving it a good listen tomorrow. I left town and unplugged everything becauuse of storms. I will get back tonight and maybe listen a little more. All the new stuff has made my stereo sound much better. I played it safe by making  a vertical move sticking to the same brands.i have taken some of the more shrill sounding CDs from tbe 80s for a spin and they do sound a lot better. 

I got a Marantz SA10 last week, and I only have about 50 hours on it. While it is better in most respects than the Sony XA5400ES and XA9000ES that I also own, it exhibits a brightness that is quite annoying. Many female voices present a brightness/grain that was absent from Sony’s rendering (especially on SACDs). For example, Jacintha’s voice is super smooth, detailed, and beautiful on Sony, but gains a mild yet annoying shrill with the Marantz. Similar findings for Jacqui Naylor, Vanessa Fernandez, Julia Fordham and even Holly Cole. Do you experience anything similar with your player/system?
I do not have anything else bright in my system, from KEF Reference speakers to Luxman C900u and M900u amplification. The effect is a little less pronounced when switching interconnects from AQ Cheetah XLRs to Gabriel Gold Revelations RCAs, but not gone.

I haven't noticed any shrill except for a couple of days the AC was out. I had a Sony XA5400ES 5 years ago and this flat out beats it. Give it another 100 hours and use a good power cord. Try the filters too. Good luck

Thank you for the fast reply! I thought the filters only work for CDs and not for SACDs. I am using a Wolff Carbon PC, so that should not be the issue. However, one other change that I made with the arrival of the SA10 is that I installed an Oyaide WPC-Z mounting frame with carbon plate on the outlet for the dedicated power line. I can only hope that is the source for the brightness. I have to add the Sony back and A/B test, and remove the new outlet frame. I will post the findings.

When I ran a new dedicated line my system was not sounding the best for a while. My players chassis is damped and isolated with brass cones, maple block and rubber cork blocks on the bottom. Maoleshade system. I think that helps

Sorry for the typos. I just woke up.

Thank you, Elizabeth and Blueranger! I know exactly what you are talking about. However, in my system, the only two new changes are the SA10 replacing the XA5400ES and the addition of an aluminum/carbon outlet frame on the main outlet. I installed the dedicated line 7 years ago and terminated it at the time with an Oyaide R1 cryo outlet. That outlet powers two Furman Reference PCs, one for the amp, preamp, and CDP, and one for the subwoofer and some video components.
The other thing I can think of is that the SA10’s output level is higher than the Sony’s, so the preamp volume is now in a different range than it used to be (and that may mean for Luxman’s LECUA that it uses electronics/paths that have not been used much); still, I do not remember this type of brightness when the preamp was breaking in.

Thank You for the updates- astru
blueranger and Elizabeth.  Hope you guys are well and enjoying your SA-10.  Happy Listening!

It will be the last SACD player I buy.

With the Oyaide frame (bought on eBay from Japan and possibly fake) out, most of the brightness is gone. Jacintha's Moon River and Here's To Life became enjoyable again, for example. However, I hope the SA10 still needs break-in because her voice is not as in-the-room/unplugged as with the Sony. Everything else is arguably better, from pinpoint imagining to instruments being more fleshed out and more natural sounding, with better decays. I just need female vocals to become a tad more natural sounding to love this player.

I have had mine a month and yours will continue to resolve more details and place more air around the instruments. Enjoy

I am baffled by what d2girls said too. Could you please clarify?
It would have made some sense if the statement were that it uses a new disc transport just developed by Marantz and there may be some issue or at least lack of data with that; thus, it may be better to use it only as a DAC. The DAC is what supposedly makes this player special.

I received my Marantz SA-10 today after 3 weeks wait.  Out of the box, it terminated my vinyl rigs and DAC.  I never know my system can sound that good; very high resolution, precise imaging, and good layering.  I am hearing a lot of things I never heard before.  Listening to SA-10 becomes addictive...

After it's broken in, I will share more...

When I first got mine it was a wake up moment. I was very impressed with the player however after extended listenings its not going to replace my vinyl rig. Its really good digital. A big leap. However it does not always have the detail archival as my TT. 

@anwar ,
Congratulations on the Marantz!
Would love to hear from you when you compare the Marantz, Denafrips and Oppo.

Thank You - anwar

keep us posted as you massage the SA-10 into your system.

Happy Listening!

@milpai @jafant thanks. yes I plan to share comparison of my digital gears.

A few things I found out during the first day of use. I’ve tried USB A and B inputs, coax not yet. SA-10 sounds the best when I play CD or SACD using its transport.

When playing from USB thumb drive (SA-10 USB A input), it must be formatted as FAT32. For sizes > 32GB, it needs to be formatted using third party utilities, not Windows. 1 problem with playing from USB thumb drive is that SA-10 does not support gapless playback. There is relay click between each file/track.

I tried Sony HAP-Z1ES hard disk player into SA-10 USB B input. No problem with gapless playback. Curious USB Cable is used. I still don’t understand why it sounds inferior compared to playing CD/SACD directly on SA-10. I also purchase high res music online and save into Sony’s HDD so this is something I need to fix.

anwar,
What DAC were you using prior to the SA-10?

@roxy54 I started with Ayon CD-07, then tried Sony HAP-Z1ES internal DAC, not happy as Ayon sounds better.  Both of them use Burr Brown 1796 DAC.  Then I purchased Denafrips Terminator R2R DAC 4 months ago, using Sony as a player with USB Audio connection.

Hello, hap-z1es with firmware 18120r support sa-10？
Are you using latest firmware also? Thank you

I do not see any new firmware for SA-10 on the Marantz website. Could you please elaborate on the firmware?

I got to play a little bit with the sound settings. (I can confirm that they only work on CD/PCM signal and not on SACD/DSD signal.) Some findings (in my system and to my ears):
Filter 2 sounds more natural overall, with better instrument attack. Although they say it would be brighter than Filter 1 and I complained about some brightness, I do not find that to be true in my system; maybe a little bit the opposite. Filter 1 increases the sound density; to a degree, it sounds more pleasant, but I feel that it is a coloring of the sound.
I ended up keeping the Dither 1 setting, but it was difficult to make a difference/choice between 1 and Off; setting 2 was not to my liking.
I changed NoiseShaper to setting 4th-1. I do agree that the sound stage seems a little tighter with 3th-1, especially by pinpointing vocals, but my Luxmans and the KEFs are already doing a fantastic job with the sound stage and I preferred the slightly perceived increase in overall sound definition of 4th-1.
These findings may be highly dependent on the source. My test discs were:
- Diana Krall: Turn Up the Quiet
- Katty Perry: MTV Unplugged
- Adam Cohen: We Go Home
- Dorati/London Symphony: Enesco’s Romanian Rhapsody 1 and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies 1-6 (I can see some people preferring Filter 1 on this CD because instruments sound a little richer with that setting)

All these different setting combinations seem to me like a cop-out on the part of the designer.  Surely the goal is to design and manufacture a machine as faithful to the original signal as possible; one presumes one setting combination comes closer to that than all the others.  Their inclusion seems like putting a parametric equalizer on a preamp.

I believe the point of the settings is that the PCM format is not lossless, and Marantz provides the option to play with different settings because there is no agreed way to reconstruct the original acoustic signal. None of those settings work for DSD, which has "enough" resolution. In fact, I plan to try finding out which combination of settings on PCM comes as close as possible to DSD by using hybrid discs - but that’s a pretty substantial effort (for long winter evenings), and it will be recording-dependent most likely.

Elizabeth, if your unit is made for the US market then the XLR polarity follows the US standard: pin 2 is hot and pin 3 is cold. You should not reverse it. (BTW, phase and polarity are different things.) Also, except for dither, there is no "Off". You may keep Marantz default settings, but those do not provide the highest SNR, as they documented in the manual.

astru

... the point of the settings is that the PCM format is not lossless ... there is no agreed way to reconstruct the original acoustic signal.

You must be confused. PCM is very much a lossless format. That doesn't mean it's perfect, but it is most certainly lossless.

You are saying that a discrete encoding using 16-bit resolution at 44KHz sampling rate of continuous signals from 0 to 20KHz is not lossless? You get quantization errors + you are guaranteed not to be able to recover perfectly the high frequencies. Please "unconfuse" me.

astru

You are saying that a discrete encoding using 16-bit resolution at 44KHz sampling rate of continuous signals from 0 to 20KHz is not lossless?

No, not at all. As I said:

PCM is very much a lossless format.

That doesn't mean PCM is perfect. But all audio formats are subject to limited bandwidth and various distortions, to some extent. But no, 16/44 PCM is not a lossy format.

blueranger

Kind of in the same boat............I live rural, maybe two hours from decent audio salons in either Baltimore or DC, so  my experience is primarily based on my experience. No audiophile friends, music lovers yes, audiophiles no. Picked up a Marantz SA14s1 a few weeks ago..............love it, probably my last CD player. I'd read Elizabeth's experience with her SA-10, but that one is a bit out of my range, so the 14s1 is about as good as I'm gonna get in this lifetime, but hey, it's pretty damn good :).........As an aside, I'm still finding ways to make my "room/setup" better. Surprising just how much performance you can squeeze out of the room itself with a little patience.......and little or no money :)