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In Reply to: RE: the 777ES is my standard for sound quality posted by David S. on January 27, 2014 at 10:29:32
The XA-777ES or the earlier one? I had the "XA,"thought it was okay on SACDs and not-okay on CDs and sold it long ago. I just bought an Oppo 105 (had the BDP-8SE model earlier) and plan to send it to Modwright in the next couple of days. Yeah, their mod costs twice as much as the Oppo, but I've heard the Oppo long enough -- maybe 75-100 hours -- to believe that it is worth the gamble.
Follow Ups:
Don't know anything about the XA unit.
But on mine the main chip seemed to have died or gone intermittent, so I sold it cheap, with a perfectly good sled mechanism, laser, and a Superclock IV, plus many circuit upgrades as outlined here in previous years by fmak and others.
The Ayre C5XeMP is at least as good, probably better on RBCDs. A fully broken in XA5400ES is shockingly good on SACDs. My own Oppo BDP105 has only a few hours on it, so I would not make a definitive judgement.
The Sony XA-777ES was their flagship 2nd generation player, had a MSRP of $3,000 and a street price of ~ $2,000, was extremely well-reviewed at the time.
The SCD1 and the SCD777ES were literally "built like a tank", had massive copper-ful chassis', and a great transport. Plus one had room inside to perform some extensive mods. Once you replaced the clock and re-arranged the grounding scheme, either one was special, as witness the fact that so many still swear by them. I wager there is no older product still "alive" in high end CDPs.
My objection to Sony's 1st and 2nd generation flagship SACD players was that they sounded, to me, so blah playing CDs. Given that there were so few SACDs available at the time -- and I had a ton of CDs -- I could never, for long, justify the price just to play SACD. When I got a Raysonic 128 tubed CD player after hearing it simply destroy my XA-777ES on Redbook, I figured the XA had to go while it still had some value.The Oppo 105 is the first SACD/CD player I've owned that sounds as good on CDs as the Raysonic. Not better, but as good. Let me know if you'd like to hear it when it gets back from Modwright and has a few hours on it. It would be fun to compare it to your stock 105.
Edits: 01/28/14
as you know. And I agree that it is superior to my old SCD777ES on RBCDs, even after all the mods I implemented to the 777. Stuff happened recently that has me looking at a surfeit of choices for CDPs.
I had both a Raysonic 168 and the Sony SCD777ES in my system at the same time. Both were connected with the same duplicate set of cables and I did extensive a/b comparisons. I found the Raysonic waaaaay too soft on top and so I experimented with tube rolling. I could never get it to sound as good as the Sony on Redbook cd's and subsequently sold the Raysonic. I still have the Sony player in my office system and I play it a couple of times a week.
"Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells."
Perhaps your assessment is more accurate than mine. I've only heard the Raysonic at Dave's house and the 777 in my house, never the two together in the same system. After writing that post, I actually have been thinking that I might have been unfair to the 777. But the Raysonic is very very good in Dave's system, nonetheless. Of course, the 777 plays SACD, and is superb doing that.
As you noted, the Raysonics are very responsive to tube-rolling. And the 128's somewhat weird tube arrangement -- two tubes for the balanced outs and the other two for the RCA outs --mean that you don't need to replace four tubes when doing your rolling. I found that my very best sonic results came from using the balanced outs with Russian tubes whose cyrillic ID I can no longer translate , something like 6H23(pi symbol)-EB.
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