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RE: Ayre QX-5 & C-5xemp

Posted by Charles Hansen (M) on September 20, 2017 at 05:34:18

In Reply to: RE: Ayre QX-5 & C-5xemp posted by fantja on September 19, 2017 at 08:14:44:

> > is Ayre going to make a successor to the C-5xe spinner? < <

I've learned it is a very bad idea to announce product plans - for many reasons. However it is fairly trivial to purchase drives that will play CDs. It is much, *much* harder to purchase drives that will also play SACDs.

Obviously many costs will be the same - the chassis as one obvious example. But the actual disc spinner + decoder for SACD is roughly 10x more expensive - if you can even find one. It's a shame that Pioneer discontinued the player used for the C-5xe, but that happened over 12 years ago. There simply isn't much available now, and all of the sources come from mass-market manufacturers with a 1-year design cycle. This means purchasing at least a 5 year supply in advance, and who knows what the demand for SACD spinners will be 5 years from now?

Playback Design had a clever idea - a small add-in board that could be installed in a (now discontinued?) Oppo Blu-ray player and sent the digital audio signal via ST glass fiber to their DAC. But it still required the customer to disassemble the unit and drill a hole in the back panel and plug some wires in. (I think the instructions are still up on the Playback website.)

PS Audio recently made a transport based on an Oppo player that will send DSD signals over a proprietary link that uses an HDMI cable. I'm unsure if the unit they use is still in production, and also what the spare parts availability is. That was the Achilles heel of many "high-end" transports made in the '90s - they used Philips transports sold by a company called Daisy, but no spares were available. The worst example of this was the $25,000 Krell CD player which had no replacement lasers available after only one year of production. I've no idea how Krell handled that one.

Even now with the C-5xe, just this year Pioneer stopped supplying all replacement parts - likely due to the acquisition by Onkyo, which in turn was bought by Gibson (yes, the guitar company). Ayre has run out of replacement drives, so the only option is to find a used one on eBay or similar and cross your fingers that it lasts. It's really not a great plan for anybody.

The best recommendation I can make is to purchase one of a few specific Blu-ray players from either Pioneer or Oppo (all discontinued now, so only used units available) that have been hacked and ripping the SACDs for storage on a hard drive. I don't see much of a future for SACD disc spinners. Sad, but true.

Don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger.

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