I have been impressed with the sound of the Sony SACD players. Have yet to hear the Marantz, but $7500 is more than I'm willing to spend on a player anyway. New and cheaper Sony is supposedly just around the corner. And I have also read about a new Philips $2000 unit. The thing that would drive me absolutely nuts with the Sony players I checked out was the ungodly long time it took to initialize a disc. Strangely enough, I don't hear much negative feedback about this. I'm sure that is going to irk many people out there. I hope the upcoming players don't follow suit in this regard. I have now been waiting for three years to move on a new player. Thinking in vain that the format war would have shaken itself out by now. As hindsight is 20/20, I can say I was(and am) the fool for not picking something up by now. I kind of think that CD will survive much longer than anticipated. Perhaps even remaining the dominant format for some time(5 years???). SACD being a niche, along the lines of DAT, DCC, and MD. DVD will continue on up, but it's use might continue to be primarily non-audiophile based. Who knows? I think I might just jump into a great new 24 bit/96KHz CD player. After all, I certainly am NOT getting rid of my thousand or so CDs(too much of my heart invested there).
