Beating a dead horse.... SACD

I have not had the chance to compare the 5400 to anything.  I have had a couple of OPPO and thought they were good with an exception....I believe the British reviewers call it PRAT, and the OPPOs I have used were a bit lacking in that.  One of the most involving/PRAT units I had was the Classe CDP-1....the old Ultra Analog DAC unit. 

If the majority of your SACD disks are multilayer (with redbook playability) why bother @ such a price point?

This said, I was less than impressed with early SACD (sounded imbalanced/phasy) with SOTA gear @ the time, but it could have been the SACD discs/recordings themselves. 

DeKay

A Denon 3910 should be easy to find and fit into your price point.I had one and liked it.Its built like a tank.The only reason I still dont use it is that one of my cats decided it was nice and warm and at sometime decided that it could double as a latrine.

I just put my Sony 5400 ES  in my 2 channel system.  It was taken out of HT system a few years back and replaced with an Oppo
203, and been in storage since.  My current DAC is a Bryston  DAC3, which 4 HDMI inputs, and the Sony can output the DSD
of the SACDs.  Currently I am using an Oppo 105 I the same system in the same fashion.
  The Sony sounds fantastic here.  I was never particularly enamored of it before, where it had sounded kind of soft and fuzzy connected to an AVR via HDMI.  The Oppo does sound a bit more incisive in comparison but the Sony gives a slightly bigger sound stage.  The difference between them is slight and I am glad the DAC has multiple HDMI inputs so I can play them both.
  I tried the Sony directly into the Cary Preamp via analog outputs and was much less impressed, to the point where I was wondering if if the Sony was outputting DSD over its RCA outputs.  I will have to check the Sony manual on that, if someone knows the answer I’d appreciate it, but I will be using the HDMI exclusively so it doesn’t really matter.

The 5400 was Sony's last great "ES" spinner.
Happy Listening!