The new Marantz SA-10 is the latest model in a range of high-end players stretching all the way back to the dawn of CD: in the original CD-63, launched in 1983, it had the first high-end performance-tuned CD player, and that expertise has continued to be developed over more than 30 years. The SA-10 is designed to sets new standards, whether with music on disc or content streamed from a computer, and to become the New Reference in digital audio.

To achieve that, the SA-10 is a completely new design, drawing on all that experience in making great-sounding players but with virtually every part redesigned. That involved both innovation and some unique thinking, all in the cause of getting the best possible performance across a wide range of digital audio formats. The new model is an exceptional player of both CD and SACD discs, but can also play high-resolution music stored on computer-burned discs, as well as being a high-end digital to analogue converter for computer-stored music.

From the unique new disc transport designed for this player all the way through to a complete rethink of the way digital audio data is converted into analogue signals, the SA-10 is a ‘clean sheet’ design, the result of painstaking research and development and extensive listening in Marantz’s custom-built listening facilities. That’s symptomatic of the way Marantz has always done things: while it always aims for the most elegant engineering solution, the listening test is always the final arbiter. It’s all to do with that simple phrase running through the heart of everything the company does: ‘Because Music Matters’.

However, the SA-10 goes so much further than just disc playback: it’s also a fully-functional digital-to-analogue converter for music stored on a home computer, as well as having conventional digital inputs for existing source components.
Those conventional inputs – optical and coaxial – can handle files at up to 192kHz/24bit, but in addition the player’s digital input section includes a USB-B asynchronous input for the direct connection of a computer, and this is compatible with PCM and DXD music files at up to 384kHz/32bit, as well as DSD64, DSD128 and DSD256.

That means the SA-10 is not only equipped to handle all the commonly-available high-resolution audio formats now sold by online retailers, but also the ultra-high-resolution files becoming available from a number of specialist labels and outlets. In other words, the new player is entirely futureproof.
What’s more, the digital input section is completely isolated, to avoid any electrical noise from connected components – a particular problem when computers are used as a source – from finding its way into the signal-path.

CD players (and indeed amplifiers) with built-in DACs usable for computer audio are nothing new, and neither is DSD capability on such devices. Indeed, the Marantz range already has several CD/SA-CD models so equipped. However, the SA-10 takes things further – just as it features an all-new disc transport mechanism, so the digital to analogue conversion has also been subject to a radical rethink, taking full advantage of the 1-bit conversion technology found in past flagship Marantz players, and incorporating brand-new filtering and upconversion to take advantage of this simple, but elegant solution.

In addition, all of this conversion is now done in Digital Signal Processing with 32-bit floating-point precision, rather than the 24-bit integer method used in such systems in the past.

Combining this with the reduction to a 1-bit signal straight after the oversampling filter and Sigma Delta Modulation allows a pure DSD-standard signal to be passed to the conversion section in the form of a very high-frequency stream of pulses, requiring only a very high-quality low-pass filter to remove all the superfluous high frequencies and pass the purest possible audio to the player’s output stage.

So why develop all this in-house? The Marantz engineering team says that, as ever, extensive listening sessions gave the reasons: ‘We found big sound quality differences when PCM signals got converted to DSD outside of a conventional DAC and then fed to the DSD input of the conventional DAC. The conclusion of our finding was that for best sound quality we have to do the conversion ourselves.

“This experience led us to evaluate all kind of SDM structures and optimise this to achieve the best sound quality.”