Do you have three grand just burning a hole in your pocket, and you love high quality audio? It’s likely that the latest offering from Marantz has been built for you, temporarily bringing back SACDs for the moment.
The high-end compact disc technology known as Super Audio CD might not be as popular as it once was (was it ever truly popular?), but that’s not stopping Marantz, which has unveiled a new high-end SACD player for audio enthusiasts.
Marantz’s new player is the SA8005, an SACD player with support for regular CD playback and support for HD audio over USB, capable of playing up to 192kHz over 24 bits, with a headphone amplifier (HDAM-SA2) built into the unit.
Pricing for the SA8005 isn’t cheap, sitting just shy of three thousand smackers at $2900, though it’s designed to work with another Marantz newbie, the PM8005 integrated stereo amplifier, which is $3100 and comes with types of power settings for the sound (2x70w over 8ohm, and 2x100w over 4ohm), symmetrical circuits for better balancing, and a source direct mode for playing back vinyl.
All up, the system is around $6000, and may just be the last SACD player produced, especially since there haven’t been a lot of SACD releases in recent years.
In fact, the inclusion of a DAC (Digital Audio Converter) with support over USB may be the best feature, as it should allow playback of high definition audio files, such as the FLAC files which are beginning to replace SACDs as a format, and have releases of both older and very recent music.
Regardless, the Marantz PM8005 stereo amp and SA8005 SACD player are available in both black and silver gold, with availability next month.
