I bought the Onkyo RC-260, because it was two inches shallower than the 270. Such are the factors in buying equipment.
I was happy enough with my old stereo equipment, but I’ve followed SACD-net for a while, tracked the conversation topics, and decided to try out SACD. Kal Rubinson was particularly persuasive. He confirmed that any disc player will do if it’s just going to be used as a transport to send the DSD via HDMI. Most a-v receivers are going to process DSD as PCM, but at up to a 192/24 rate. Kal and others persuaded me that the best should not be the enemy of the good, i.e., something like the RC-260 is going to provide a resolution that is better than what I was getting via 44.1 cd. The RC-260 is providing a suite of processing that is interesting and, also, fun to tinker with. The Audessey dynamic EQ is especially nice, allowing one to listen at low volumes yet still hear a good dynamic range.
Total bill:
$113 for a Pioneer universal player (no Blu-ray; I have one of those in my tv/family room), via Amazon
$284 (!) for the RC-260, via Amazon
$122 for surround speakers to match my mains, via Ebay
$69 for a matching center speaker, via Craig’s list
$94 via Ebay for an Oppo 971-hd, which as it turned out didn’t pass through the DSD via HDMI but instead sent it as PCM. I’ll give it to my son or re-sell it.
I admire people seeking to ever upgrade their systems. However, I’m paying tuition for a third child to go to college, so I’ll need to stick to budget, good-enough equipment. The WAF is always an issue. But also, in my experience, I haven’t seen sufficient marginal return on sound when I’ve auditioned higher-end items, such as a $1000 cd player. Maybe it’s there, but I can’t hear it. I listen to my daughter play the violin; she usually practices in the kitchen, which is lined with wood cabinets and has wood flooring. The room and adjacent space fill with sound and vibrate to the violin’s frequencies. That’s the sound of music. As more than one SACD-net poster has noted, live music is the real deal, and I’m lucky enough to live in college town that has live professional and student music going on all the time.
While an electronic music system can’t reproduce a live experience, a system can provide a pretty good facsimile and give you access to unique productions and performances. For several years I haven’t bought cd’s because I listened to near-cd quality material on Rhapsody over a Squeezebox. But now, because of my new system, I’ve started buying hybrid cd’s. I suspect other folks with universal players will do the same thing, so maybe we’ll see an uptick in demand for SACD format, at least in classical music.
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