Marantz SA-14

I am potentially interested in this unit as well and would like to add a couple questions. I'd like to find out if this unit offers "truly" balanced outputs. Also, how does this thing sound with regular CD's. God bless.

I am interested as well and all that I have found is one person on audioasylum that said in many ways it was better than the SA-1 which many people liked better than the Sony SCD-1. Most of the dealers I have called had a fear of two channel units that will already be obsolete when the multi-channel units come out. I was of the 2 channel only mind until I read the follow up review of the phillips player where the reviewer waxed poetic about how good one multichannel recording that comes with the phillips unit sounded. The rub is that most of the recordings are crappy and not natural sounding with instruments coming from all directions. The goal should be to feel more like you are in the concert hall. J Gordon Holt has been on the multi channel band wagon for years and swears by it.

Morasp: The person who compared SA-14 with SA-1 is Jonathan Carr, hi-end turntable and preamp designer living in Japan. Almost word-in-word confirmation came from Richard Kern (www.audiomod.com) who very succesfully modified SA-14 to ellininate its weaknesses as compared to SA-1

People who say the Marantz SA-14 is way better than the SA-1
are the ones they can only wish they own the SA-1. The SA-14 is a nice unit, but it's not in the same league as the SA-1. My dealer friend has both on the floor, and I own the SA-1. Sound, sonics, build & parts quality are all stripped down on the SA-14 to hit that price point. The funny thing Marantz will make more $money on this piece than the SA-1. The SA-1 is a statemsnt piece by the Japanese, and they know off the bat that this is purely to show the unltimate standard of SACD.