News help choosing a SACD Player / transport

@OP - To clarify a comment in one of the posts above: it is true that many - in fact the majority - of SACDs are derived from PCM files. That is because the vast majority of the DAWs that they are mixed on are PCM based. However, most of those recordings are output at sample rates and wordlengths that are higher that 16/44. There is zero point in buying an SACD transport if the accompanying DAC is not fully compatible with it. 

Your budget is getting close to the price of an Esoteric K-05XD and you can certainly find a preowned one within your budget. It is an outstanding player.

some of the greatest bargains in audiodom are the older universal players from pioneer, integra, sony etc, many of which are overbuilt to hell. i'm  a big fan of the pioneer elite dv79 and the denon 5910--you can usually find 'em for a few hundo, as opposed to dropping a couple grand on a new model.  since i won only a few sacd discs this would be the route i would go. a used oppo 95 or 105 would be another route.

For you to to get the SACD layer off the disk going to a dac it must be an HDMI to HDMI connection from the transport to the DAC. Since your DAC doesn’t have an HDMI input, and if you want to keep your current DAC, you will have to get a breakout box. It’s been talked about here several times. If you search for HDMI breakout box, you should find it. They are $50-$90. Some will say you will lose quality others will say there is no loss in quality but for less than a Benjamin what’s your downside in giving it a try.

McIntosh transports send DSD to their DA2 DACs in their preamps and integrateds via a proprietary MCT link. I own about a dozen SACDs and the SQ between them and the hi res pcm files being streamed is very slight if anything at all. I can’t really even describe the difference I hear on some musical passages, more of a feeling of some depth or three-dimensionality. But again, it’s slight and only some tracks. 

There are restrictions on outputting DSD from SACDs, look at the AI Google Overview for

are there restrictions on outputting DSD from SACDs 

However the "AI Overview" from Google, if you query 

sacd player that outputs dsd

sacd players that output dsd

may give you potential (different) answers.  Any outputs will not be standard coax or toslink, only USB or IIS will be supported and may be in a vendor specific protocol.

Google's Ai overviews are usually an interesting starting point, BUT they can contain errors so verify results, hence the two slightly different queries. 

Question, which Esoteric model were you trying?  The new XD units sound rather different from the older XS components and they have the ultimate bulletproof drive mechanisms.  Used 03XD or 05XD models may be in your price range.