Anyone Audition or buy the Music Hall Maverick SAC

Stay on the high-end of your budget and pick-up the Alex Paychev modded Denon DVD-3910. Go to aplhifi for more information.
Stereotimes did a very favorable review of the Alex Paychev modded Philips SACD-1000. Look under archives, transports/cd players.
Good luck.

Interesting. It happens that I picked up a Sony NS775 which is $129 at Amazon, just for kicks. It does a really nice job on a secondary system I have in my office. In fact, I also just received a Musical Fidelity X10 V3, the little analog buffer stage they make. I have it inline with the Sony and an Onkyo receiver and it sounds damn good. Unfortunately it has a captive lampwire as a power cord, but I'm looking forward to moving things over to my main system. Maybe something modded is the way to go.
Peter

I owned a Maverick for about six months before I sold it. It does a wonderful job on SACD, but only an average job on Redbook playback. A nice feature though was the ability to switch between upsampling and no upsampling.

It had a couple of quirks that I was not happy with. The drawer was apt to not respond when the open/close button was pushed, neccessitating powering the unit off, then on again. It also did not read several of my favorite Redbook CDs that my other players had no trouble with.

I am vinyl oriented anyway, so a first rate player is not that important to me. That being said, I have a 200.00 Sony NS500V now that I sent to SACDmods for a full set of modifications. For less than 500.00 total, I have a Redbook/2 channel SACD player that more than suits my needs.