Esoteric SA-50 CD/SACD Player and DAC (TAS 203)

Digital Swiss Army Knife

Esoteric’s new SA-50 CD player offers a host of features and capabilities unimaginable to the original designers of the CD format. Not just a CD player, the SA-50 will spin SACDs, decode other digital sources (including a music-server’s output via USB), switch between digital sources, and drive a power amplifier directly. If you have no analog sources in your system, the SA-50 obviates the need for a preamplifier. This architecture not only saves money, but provides better sound quality. After all, the best preamplifier is no preamplifier.

Moreover, the SA-50 is packed with sophisticated technology. The unit offers a wide range of user-selectable upsampling options, a two-stage PLL reclocking circuit to reduce jitter from external sources, a dual-mono implementation of a new 32-bit DAC, a clock input, and a new minimum-phase digital filter (selectable) that doesn’t introduce pre-ringing (a type of time-domain distortion).

Although well built and attractive, the SA-50 looks more business-like than Esoteric’s more costly offerings. Priced at $5800, the SA-50 is clearly intended to be an extremely high-value product that provides a multifaceted answer to the needs of today’s complex digital sources. In fact, it struck me that the SA-50 is nearly functionally equivalent to the $23,000 dCS Puccini/U-Clock combination I reviewed in Issue 200. The Esoteric lacks an asynchronous USB interface and external clock, but will do much of what the dCS does at a fraction of the price.

How can Esoteric offer so much for so little? The only concessions to cost that I could see were the flat front faceplate (more expensive Esoteric models have sculpted front panels), a plastic rather than a metal drawer, and…that’s it. The unit is built like a tank, weighing in at nearly 40 pounds and featuring Esoteric’s three-point vibration-isolation feet. The transport mechanism is a more cost-effective implementation of Esoteric’s vaunted VRDS transport, known in the SA-50 as VOSP (Vertically-aligned Optical Stability Platform). Although scaled down in implementation, the transport nonetheless maintains the key element of clamping the entire disc surface rather than just a small area at the disc’s center. The power transformer is huge, accounting for a good percentage of the unit’s heft.

Let’s take a closer look at the SA-50’s rich feature-set. The Esoteric offers balanced and unbalanced outputs, along with either fixed or variable operation. In the fixed-output mode, the SA-50 functions as a conventional CD player, with the volume controlled by your preamplifier. In the variable mode, the SA-50 drives a preamplifier directly with volume controlled by the SA-50’s remote control. The amount of attenuation is shown in the front-panel display. Note that you must go into the set-up menu to activate the variable-output mode (the default is fixed output). This could cause a problem the first time you connect the SA-50 directly to a power amplifier and play a disc. If you’re expecting to be able to adjust the volume via the remote control, you’ll get a surprise in the form of a full-level signal driving your amplifier.

You can specify in the set-up menu whether Pin 2 or Pin 3 of the XLR analog-output jack is “hot.” This allows you to determine if the SA-50 is polarity inverting or not. If used with a “Pin-2 hot” power amplifier, choosing “Pin-2 hot” in the set-up menu means the SA-50 is not polarity inverting.

Three digital inputs (USB, coaxial, TosLink) are provided along with front-panel source-switching between these inputs. The combination of a volume control and multiple inputs allows the SA-50 to serve as your system’s control center, selecting sources and adjusting the volume. Note, however, that the USB input is limited to 48kHz/16-bit data. This is surprising given that most listeners’ music servers will be loaded with high-resolution files, and that 96kHz USB is common.

The SA-50 offers four upsampling options. The most basic is called “ORG” (for “original”) which simply puts the signal through an 8x oversampling digital filter. In the “2FS” mode, the unit upsamples 44.1kHz (either from an external source or from the internal disc drive) to 88.2kHz (or 48kHz to 96kHz). The “4FS” mode converts 44.1kHz data to 176.4kHz (and external 48kHz data to 192kHz). Finally, selecting “DSD” converts the PCM data to the 2.8224MHz single-bit Direct Stream Digital format for conversion to analog. This latter feature, in my experience with this and other players with the same capability, offers better sound than when the PCM signal is converted to analog. In addition, when an SACD is played, the DSD bitstream is kept in its native format and converted to analog with a single-bit DAC. This is the only way to hear the full glory of DSD.