Any information on the new Ayre C5xe player?

How much does this player cost? Is it 2-channel or multichannel? When you play DVD-A's can you select 2-channel playback without a screen? Balanced/RCA outputs?

Now that I have spent some significant time with an Exemplar 2900, I ask myself, is SACD really necessary? This player forced me to stop and think.

Prior to owning the Exemplar 2900 I owned the Sony XA777ES. SACD's on the Sony sounded very, very good to me. Way better than my redbook versions of the same discs. But after spending several months with the Exemplar I began to notice no significant difference, on many quality recordings, between the SACD and the redbook. For example, I owned two versions of Bill Evans 'Waltz for Debby': one was the SACD and one was the Super-K2 20 bit remaster. Well, on the Exemplar Denon, in my system, I could not tell a significant difference between the two, and, on a few tracks, I actually preferred the 20 bit remaster. This exeperience repeated itself a few times.

This has given me pause. It makes me wonder whether I should just go for a really high quality redbook only player and forget the whole Hi-Rez thing altogether (especially because I am two-channel and don't need DVD). While I have invested a lot of money in SACD only about %10 of them were music I re-bought and the vast majority were hybrids -- so it would not be hard to divest myself of the single-sided SACD's and keep the hybrids (which is mostly new music for me) if I wanted.

I have learned a lot and one of the things that keeps coming back to me is that maybe I just had never owned a really exceptional redbook player before the Exemplar. I have not come to any conclusions...I will definitely audition the new Ayre player if I can -- its redbook performance will have to be awesome though. Thanks for reading,

SRP is $6K and I expect there won't be much room for negotiation if this platform is popular. I can't tell you how good the redbook playback will become, having auditioned a new player in my system. But I can tell you that, with less than a 100 hours, it was very revealing and was better than my 588 at defining the soundstage. It was a bit forward, as you might expect of a new player, but the C5xe is a superb, dedicated two-channel CD/SACD platform. Fit and finish are also outstanding, though I'm not in love with the noisy drawer.

I recently traded in my Ayre C7xe in on a C5xe. The 5 makes the 7 sound like a waiste of time.