Review: Sony SCD-XA5400ES CD Player

After hearding the Terra firma Mod of the Sony xa5400 I Thought it was the best I am glad I waited, while on business I heard Dan Modwrights latest and very extensive transformation of this unit Now with a Vacuum tube OTL analog section as well as a Vacuumtube rectified Seperate power supply Just go to Modwrights webpage and check it out for $2k you now have a player that Nothing and I mean nothing that is in the class A section at $10k that will touch it ,he had a Esoteric 03-se there it was very good ,but the Sony was that much more realistic .I have spent more than a house on audio over the past 25 years and know when something is special sacd may be a little better but now even redbook cds can compete with a Very good turntable and that is saying a lot! My unit has just come back and I am giving it some run in time before giving a formal review ,so far even not runin yet I am not getting much work done for I am hearing nuances in the recording that I did not know that was there and the air around the instruments is much better than I expected I will get back here in a couple of weeks to update on the breakin.

I sent my player to Dan Wright today. For $2000 dollars it is nothing short of a gift what Dan's modification entails. You also get an external power supply!! can;t wait.

Dave----Your review of Sony xa5400es convinced me to buy it to replace a dying Marantz. Your opinion and a $1039 plus shipping price. What a revelation this piece is. Extraordinary detail and spot on resolution but, more than anything else, musicality. It never sounds colored in any way. It simply never sounds digital. At about 3-400 hrs in I notice very little if any change. This was stellar out of the box. Please let us know what the modded unit sounds like. I needent encourage you to specificity as we can always expect and get that from you. I gently remind all who have parsed specs that one of the most if not THE most respected reviewers in Stereophile, Kalman Rubinson, called it the best CD player he's yet heard with price not a consideration. My equipment: Vincent SV236MkII integrated, all signal cable cabling, Legacy Classic HDs and, of course, the Sony. Can't wait to hear about the Modwright mods.

Nice system Gregfey! I'll be sure to post my review after a thorough listen with all genre of music.

Tube designs have their followers, nostalgia and a belief by many that the tube sound is in some way better because it gives a warmer presentation; at the end of the day personal preferences will always apply, but for those of us who over many years followed technology and its advances feel that the many disadvantages of tube technology, no longer represents a level playing field against solid state. Here are some of the major reasons; To produce a first class tube amplifier capable of driving many of the modern multiway speakers, you are looking at an almost prohibitive cost of decent transformers, which include heavy chokes, expensive coupling capacitors and high voltage resistors, then this amplifier from the first day of switch on will be changing its characteristics as the tubes settle then age, so that in order to maintain its distortion levels a regular balance check will be required of the output devices. If you are a regular listener then of course tube replacement will become mandatory fairly regularly and then there is the heat issue. The distortion from tubes is mainly second harmonic which is less irritating to the listener but still suffers a level some fifty to one hundred times that of solid state, some tube designs do not even meet the IEC Hi-Fi standard for distortion at 0.25% or more, which will get worse as tubes age, some designs have now down away with feedback altogether, resulting in very low damping factors, again failing the IEC standard. Most tube designs are still largely the same as those early efforts from Mullard and Brimar so there is a limit to what can realistically be achieved in future design; By contrast solid state has hundreds of variations and technically are regarded as blameless, and for an equivalent cost to the tube would produce an amplifier of superb performance, distortion down to 0.002% damping factor up to 100+ compact size, powerful and trouble free, no competition whatever from tubes... Thats your choice!!!!