Were you aware that until a few years ago, there were only a handful of companies making high end SACD/CD transports? Sony, Esoteric, and another company whose name I forget. All high end transports were sourced from them. These days, there is only Esoteric, and Esoteric has stopped third party sales of transports. This is why companies like Playback Designs have stopped offering SACD players and have turned into a DAC company - because their transport supply has dried up. DCS has a stock of Esoteric transports, but they only move a handful of their high end Vivaldi transports anyway. As for MSB, they use a modified Oppo and are quite open about this.
In short - all transports right now, with the exception of Esoteric, are mass market low end transports. If you want a superb transport, look for a secondhand transport based on the Sony ES mechanism, or a transport based on Esoteric (e.g. Playback Designs, DCS), or get a new Esoteric.
Note that I am only talking about the disc spinning mechanism and laser assembly itself. The bit that slides in and out might make the transport look proprietary, but the underlying mechanism/laser is still a mass market transport. Neither am I referring to the electronics that looks at the data after it is read. Some, like the Memory Player (not sure if it's still around) reads until it is perfect, buffers it in memory, reclocks it, and sends it. I believe the PS Audio Perfectwave transport uses a low end disc spinning mechanism (low end compared to Esoteric), but it is the electronics that make it special.
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.... I am sure they would sound even better than using the Marantz DAC in my SA8005. It sounds like the SA10 has top notch DAC capabilities, but I have not been able to tell which DAC is being used. Would be something special if it was using the new ESS chips.... 9028 PRO or 9038 PRO. They are amazing!
