Sony SCD-CE775 5-Disc CD Changer

I recently decided it was time to see if digital recording was finally going to live up to its promise of the perfect sound forever. The original compact disk sure never lived up to its promise. Ever since I heard a properly set up turntable I have been wondering what those people at Sony and Philips were thinking. I decided on purchasing the el cheapo model for now, because in my thinking if SACD is really supposed to be that much better than conventional CD then a budget model should be able to destroy the performance of an equally priced cd player. I also figure machines will improve and prices will come down, as they always do. On to review. I'm here to tell you that CD is dead and SACD has lived up to the promise. I bought the Sony SCD-CE775 from Vanns.com for $199. That seems to be a pretty reasonable price even for just a regular cd player. This is probably the cheapest SACD player in existence at this present time, but that doesn't mean it is a peace of crap. Trust me when I say this thing plays music, under the right conditions that is. I will explain in a moment. I was very exited when my SACD player arrived in the mail, and after hooking it up, and playing some jazz through it I was very impressed at how much sound was coming out of my speakers. I was however not very satisfied with the overall sound quality of this thing. Let me explain.
I immediately noticed how boomy and loud the base sounded, as well as a hint of grain in the sound. There seemed to be a lot of sound coming from this thing but I was disappointed by the fact that I was experiencing a good amount of listener fatigue as well. I felt like I wanted to turn the volume down in stead of turn it up. This is never a good sign. I had thought that SACD was supposed to have eliminated that overly bright and distorted sound of conventional CD. Fortunately for me, I didn't decide to pack it up and ship it back just yet. I decided that maybe the thing to do was embark on some tweaking of this black box. So first off went the factory provided interconnect and in it's place went a pretty good diy one. This got rid of the grainyness but I still had all the other problems. (I highly recommend using a better interconnect of your choice than the crapy ones the manufactures send you. Those are really just ment to be temporary till you get something better.) The next thing I tried was putting some soft rubber feet under the crapy ones built into this thing. This reduced a little bit of the boomy base but not much. Next I tried putting small plastic bags of sand on top of the case to see if there was a high vibration problem that needed fixing. This was the key to obtaining the sound quality I wanted. This cut the boomy base in half as well as removing the overly bright artifacts I was hearing. Now this thing was starting to sound good. I wasn't done there though. The final step in making this thing sing was taking the cover off and coating it with a thin layer of sound dampening paint. (note this will void your warranty). After letting the paint dry and putting the cover back on, I now had a machine that completely destroyed my Linn cd player (paid $1,500) as well as giving my LP front end a run for it's money. Sometimes even beating it. Applying the dampening paint revealed detail in the music that I just wasn't hearing previously. Yes folks the new SACD format is simply amazing. This little player is a not so good machine that can be turned into a monster performer. The problem with this machine isn't the hardware under the box but the crapy build quality of the box itself. But what do you expect from a mass produced $199 player, miracles? Well you'll get miracles if you can get that crapy box from vibrating. I highly recommend buying this player and then tweaking it for optimal performance. For $199 bucks, it's a steal in my book.