SACD Player/Transport Choices

@faustuss

Not sure if you are referring to the Reavon universal disk transport / players, but the UBR-X110 I mentioned is a pure transport and its outputs are digital only - 2 x HDMI, 1 x coax digital and 1 x optical digital.  It transports SACD natively over HDMI.

The UBR-X200 on the other hand does add two Burr-Brown DACs, one for two-channel analogue playback and one for multi-channel, including SACDs.  These DACs are inferior to the ESS Sabre DACs in the Oppo, in particular because they cannot natively process DSD.  They down-convert to CD quality!  So in my book, the DACs in the 200 are a waste of money, especially when compared to the DAC-less 110.  Both are excellent transports.

HDMI is a digital standard, but that does not stop others from trying to push analogue down the cable.  The Dometic analogue TV cameras in my motorhome connect to the display head using an HDMI cable and standard connections, which are particularly unsuitable for in-vehicle installations.  There is a rugged HDMI connector made specifically for in-vehicle use, but Dometic don't use it.  This is an unnatural act, in my opinion, like using HDMI cable for I2S 

The ONIX will be shown at AXPONA this weekend by the us distributor. I believe DSD over I2s

Like DAT, CD/SACD player are mechanical devices, sooner or later they will fail requiring service. I refer to SACD and Cd equally here.

Whether broken or worn o-rings, belts, laser rot, or the usual caps drying out, they won't last. I have many SACD and CDs, all of them are ripped to hard drive and streamed as preference, far more convenient to search.

The SQ is pretty much up there compared with CD playback, however streaming from Qobuz, Tidal, Apple etc. meh, a bit of a way to go.

I do like to play CDs, however for the long term, like my remaining 20-30 years, I will outlive a SACD player which means one day it will fail and two I own are already 'jittery', one takes 3-5 shots to load and recognise a disc, the other just stops playing about 15minutes into a disc and won't play in the summer due to humidity. Such unreliability I can do without, the whole enjoyment tanks.

There's uncertainty with file playback, however with management and judicious backups, there's a plan to get around known shortcomings. Streamers are a plenty, even more DACs, CD players not so much. A CD Player will start rotting, even if kept as a spare. Of spares, ever tried to buy a Sony CD player spare part, unobtanium.

Going to have to come to terms that CD playback is for nostalgia.

@richardbrand, totally agree with using I2S with HDMI. I2S is really LVDS with so many different pinouts, far better to use an RJ45 instead of the crappy and temperamental HDMI connector, let alone the cable properties with so many cores and cross talk. 

I’ve excerpt this from Onix’s literature easily obtainable with a simple search or 

https://onixhiend.co.uk/introducing-onix-zenith-xst20/

I have underlined statements here you should take note of...

"FPGA-Assisted I2S Output

While many audiophiles are looking for a reliable I2S transport for their High-End DACs, the lack of standardization in this part of market would previously cause many compatibility issues. However, our Zenith XST20 features special hardware that allows switching between 10 I2S pinout modes, significantly expanding its compatibility to virtually all I2S DACs on the market."

Seems to imply with the use of their Field Programable Gate Array are able in some cases configure the output to circumvent Sony’s copyright protection and scheme and possibly make the XST20 compatible with other DAC’s. There may be some wrinkle in copyright law that lets them attempt that but we’ll see if Sony tries to intervene or not.