New SACD Marantz SA11-S3 any listening comments

[raidho]

Hallo Alukid,

you are welcome.


sorry if you use the Sa11s3 as Dac with your PC with not the Marantz Na11s1?

OT: what for Utopia is your taget? the Diablo, Scala or?!?!


thank you
Style

[Alukid]

Originally Posted by raidho

Hallo Alukid,

you are welcome.

sorry if you use the Sa11s3 as Dac with your PC with not the Marantz Na11s1?

OT: what for Utopia is your taget? the Diablo, Scala or?!?!

thank you
Style

Hi raidho,

Good question, i wanted to get the sa11s3 because i also wanted a sacd player, its realy nice to have an awesome dac but also good to have a choice of playing some real sacds if needs be.

Edit: Another reason why i chose the sa11s3 over the NA11s1 is that i might in future start collecting cds instead of using a pc for music.


Regarding focal, though i would like to get the Scala, im going to be realistic with what can be afforded and go for the diablo, i think they are beautiful speakers.





Alukid

[chessman]

Alukid, welcome aboard!

[Alukid]

Thanks for the welcome guys

[Toccata]

Has anyone compared this player to a Sony 5400 ES or an Oppo 105? If so, what were your findings?

[miketuason]

Originally Posted by Toccata

Has anyone compared this player to a Sony 5400 ES or an Oppo 105? If son, what were your findings?

+1 I like to know how it compares to the Oppo.

[rnrmf1971]

I'm pretty sure the Absolute Sound did that comparison; Oppo vs Marantz

[Toccata]

The review mentions the Oppo, but the reviewer did not compare them, or at least not in the one review that I found. He did, however, love the Marantz, and by implication, prefers it over the Oppo:

"This new Marantz is one of the best I’ve heard anywhere and unquestionably the best I’ve had in house. One of the last things I played was the Anonymous Four’s Gloryland. Never have I heard it reproduced with greater purity, presence, or throat-catching beauty."

"As for the SA-11S3, well, unless I had much more discretionary income than I do, four grand is about the absolute most I’d consider paying for any product with a technology that changes as rapidly as digital does. But if I did make such a plunge, this Marantz would head the list, and by some distance, owing to its lineage, its perfect mediation of musicality and neutrality on Red Book sources, and its absolutely magnificent SACD performance."

[rnrmf1971]

What I was thinking of was this sidebar to the Marantz review in the May/June 2013 Absolute Sound:

"subjective reviewing of audio components continues to generate controversy, as i believe it should: no one who attempts to practice it responsibly is unaware that it’s fraught with countless perils and pitfalls. yet a pair of coincidences surrounding my review of these Marantz components served to reaffirm the validity and necessity of critical listening as an evaluative tool. right around the time the Marantzes were delivered, i purchased oppo’s new bdp-105 universal player. Although i bought it for blu-ray and dvd playback, i couldn’t resist comparing it to the sA-11s3. With both sAcd and red book sources, the differences were obvious. the oppo has exceptional clarity, definition, control, and resolution, but it was also to my ears very much a yang, as opposed to yin, sound. i didn’t dislike it in the least and would have no trouble using it as a primary disc player, but in every comparison i preferred the sA-11s3, which i found to offer somewhat richer, rounder, more natural reproduction at virtually no sacrifice of the qualities that distinguished the oppo.
then, just as i had finished writing this review but before i sent it off, i received my advance copies of tAs 232, which contained chris Martens’ review of the bdp-105. let me preface what i’m about to say by pointing out i do not know chris at all well— we’ve met at most twice, i think, brief hail-fellow-well-met ces introductions—and we don’t correspond via e-mail or any of the internet social sites. nor did i receive a prepublication copy of his review—indeed, i didn’t even know he was writing it. And chris’ reference system is very different from mine. yet just about everything chris had to say about the oppo’s performance on both cd and sAcd tallies with my own experience in virtually every aspect and particular, notably his observation that the oppo might strike some as lean-sounding. one of things i noticed—again, well before reading chris’ review—was that, to take one example, at the beginning of stokowski’s recording of liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, the Marantz suggested more weight, power, and depth in the doublebasses. both units displayed comparable definition and clarity, but the Marantz was audibly richer and projected the fundamentals with greater extension. though i didn’t use the word “lean” in my notes, clearly i was hearing some of the same things as chris.
now anyone who reads chris’ review (and i urge you to) will soon notice that he and i do not attach the same values to what we heard. he is ready to ascribe greater accuracy to the oppo, myself to the Marantz. but that is not my point, which is rather that our descriptions of the oppo’s reproduction are remarkably similar quite apart from how we ultimately interpreted what we heard. it’s rare that we reviewers get an opportunity to set down our impressions of the same product; when it happens, it’s always gratifying to find we hear more or less the same things, the differences consisting in how we subjectively evaluate our findings. in this instance, i can even second chris’ warning about the break-in time for the oppo, which mirrored my own experience. he’s right on the money, and i say this as someone who usually has a healthy skepticism for the whole idea of break-in! PS"

[Toccata]

That sounds reasonable. One would hope for 3x the price that the Marantz sounds better! Interestingly, I find the Sony to be a little "leaner" than the Oppo.