Is Sony SCD-1 still worth to possess?

I know there are people out there who have a different opinion, but I give a strong yes. It is still a fine SACD player and a good if not great CD player directly, but it is a fabulous CD transport to use with an outboard DAC. It replaced a Levinson 37 in my system, and from time to time I've tried pricey transports by other high end manufacturers without ever being tempted to replace it. (And no, I don't have one for sale.)

YES! as a standard unit it's still among the best redbook players. As an SACD I think it's one of the top. If you get one and modify it to the Audiocom-UK standard it's as good as any under $20,000 unit made. If you look at the advances in cd technology over the past three years nothing has been done beyond the bar Sony set with the SD-1.

I bought mine as soon as they came out and have had years of listening to the very best digital can offer while others discuss the future of the SACD format. During that time they have lost three years speculating, while I upgraded and built a library of disks. At the same time enjoying my standard disks with the best player avalible.

I know with the upgrade you would have the best made, with the standard SCD-1 you still have a great player.

The unmodified unit is great. On redbook, I think it competes with the wadia 850 and the resolution audio cd-50. The wadia has a cleaner sounding analogue stage.

I own the scd-1 w/kern mods, and am not looking for anything else now. The combination of one box convenience, build quality, and sonics are what do it for me.

The Kern audiocom mod transforms it to one of the best cd players I've heard. It's now in the same general league as the $7000 Audio Aero Capitol 24/192 mk I, the tube output Modwright XA777, and the $12,000 dcs 192 combo. My player originally had the kern parts upgrade (around 850), and I heard it back to back with the audi aero. I thought the aero was better on redbook due to it's tube output stage and built in 192 upsampling. It was more analog sounding. The $350 superclock mod made an enourmous improvement in the scd-1. I would guess they are now about equal - or so close you shouldn't care.

If you have multiple digital sources, then a transport/dac approach might make more sense.

Unless you want multichannel disc decoding capabilities (then get the XA-777ES), the SCD-1 is well worth getting. I agree with JD and John, stock it's on a level playing field with the Wadia 850 class of player and with a top quality analog stage, power supply and clock mod (I had a tube output stage mod done for me by Jerry Ozment of Audio Logic a couple of years ago on my 777ES, which he unfortunately doesn't do anymore) it can compete with the absolute best players/transport-DAC combos available on redbook and you get SACD playback as well that will knock your socks off. While the Marantz unit is apparently good sounding, I seem to recall reading about a lot of QC problems with these units compared to the SCD-1s.