Simaudio: Stellar or Equinox???

Glad to see you're still at it! First of all, I think either way you're going to have excellent results. Of course, I may be a little biased as I own a SImaudio CDP. Anyway, I think it may come down to budget, and how fanatical you are about your Redbook collection. If you really value music over HT and want to not worry about another Redbook player for awhile, I'd say go the Equinox route. Plus, since the Hi-Res format wars appear to be nowhere near sorted out, you may want to compromise in the HT area for the time being, since even the next generation video formats are up for grabs. That being said, I suspect the Stellar would not have much of a noticeable drop off in sound quality - but if you want to someday upgrade video separate from audio, it may make sense to offload those capabilities into another player.

Regards,

-Glenn

I haven't heard the Stellar yet. I think it is an assumption that the dedicated, single format box can offer slight improvements in sound quality because the overall architecture is simpler and you can really optimize the analog output stage and DAC. That being said, from an objective standpoint, there is no reason why any multiformat player should sound worse provided that it is well engineered. I don't think Simaudio would put out a player that wasn't at least very good at redbook playback. Also, whether you can tell any difference can be system dependent. Right now I am running the Eclipse into a Musical Fidelity kW-500 integrated amp, feeds my Wilson WATT Puppy 5.1s approximately 770 wpc at the WPs' nominal 4 Ohm load.