All prices are in German marks unless otherwise noted.
At time of show report, 1 U.S. dollar is worth approximately 2.1 German marks.

Like the Pioneer Standout Room, this room was not chosen as much for being the best sound of the show, but instead because it is another effective and incredibly unique demonstration of competing digital formats. Before the demonstration commenced, we asked Marantz's Ken Ishiwata about the 15,000 DM price tag on the new SA-1 SACD player. He acknowledged that the unit is definitely not low priced, but he said that the SA-1 was designed to produce the highest-quality SACD and CD sound. It was this aspect of its performance that took plenty of time to implement. This machine is not multichannel ready (an SACD feature not yet available in any player, but Marantz hopes it will be by the end of the year) and according to Ken, the SA-1 will appeal to discriminating, two-channel listeners. Now, on to the demonstration.

Ken used three identical music tracks on three different discs. One disc was an SACD. The other disc was a CD of the same music from the same master tape downsampled to 16/44.1. The third disc was also a CD, but it was recorded from the analog outputs of the SA-1 SACD player and reconverted to the 16/44.1 CD format using Ken's own A/D converter. The result? Both Jeff and Doug heard the distinct differences between the digitally downsampled CD and SACD. Overall, there was a loss of resolution, resulting in decreased ambient information on the CD, along with more midrange and high-frequency hardness. The SACD was simply better in every way. This is a similar sort of thing that was heard in the Pioneer demonstration. The real surprise was the sound of the CD recorded from the analog output of the SACD player. Jeff and Doug both thought it sounded very, very close to SACD even after going through a conversion to analog and back to digital! In fact, it was so close that we weren't sure we could choose one or the other with our eyes closed. Now that should be food for thought! Obviously, although the SACD format is superior to CD, the way the discs get mastered seems to have an enormous role in the resulting sound.

As an interesting side note to all this, we quizzed Ken about the so-called universal players. Ken replied that in the future there will be SACD players that are DVD-A compatible too. However, all these universal players are not the same in terms of the way their technology is implemented. First, current DVD-A based universal players will reportedly not play the future SACD multichannel format (presumably when multichannel SACD is released, new-generation universal DVD-A players will be released to support it). Furthermore, in order to play SACDs, DVD-A-based players don't really process the DSD stream the same way an SACD player does. Instead, SACDs are converted to 24/192 PCM, which is the native format of DVD-A. Likewise, SACD-based universal players will reportedly convert the DVD-A's 24/192 PCM format to the DSD format that SACD uses. None of these machines seem to handle DVD-A and DSD in their native format because there is only one type of circuit in each machine to convert digital to analog. Which method is superior and what should a consumer do? There appears to still be a lot of answered questions, and from our perspective, the future of digital is still up in the air.