What is the SACD Mod business all about?

I have two moded sacd machines. Neither is just a parts upgrading. One the Allen Wright Sony 9000 has a new board in it, and the other an Exemplar (Tucker) Denon 2900 has a tube analog stage in it. Both are greatly superior to stock units both for sacd and cd. The Wright unit costs $1000 plus a Sony 9000 for a total of about $1600. The Exemplar/Denon cost $3000 including a new Denon. For these prices they rival or exceed units costing $10,000-$20,000.

On both good sacd is clearly superior to good cd, but good cd is superior to poor sacd. On the Denon good sacd is superior to good dvda.

Robert, as I read your question, I think you are wondering if SACD is a bust without modification ("If the format has to be modded to sound good maybe I should just stick with cds.") Not true. First, any mods you have done will improve the redbook CD performance of your player as much as (perhaps more than) its SACD performance.

People have been modding stock CD players from the beginning. The reason there is so much mod activity around SACD players is that (1) the new format is so promising. People are hungry to extract the best they can from it. And (2), there weren't too many players out there at first, so not many all-out assaults to choose from.

You should consider modification an opportunity--an option if you want it--but not a requirement for SACD.

I see the parallel to the earlier years of CD players, until the high-end companies got into the arena. There was a very large market for mods/kludges of the stock Philips/Magnavox players until the late 80s--Scott Nixon got his start then--because the available CD players were generally mass-market machines from Sony, Denon, Philips/Magnavox and the like, hardly high-end machines for the most part. Eventually companies like Mission, Meitner, Krell, Madrigal, Theta, Wadia and others felt that the technology was going to take hold and it would be worth putting their R&D dollars into the area. We're sort of at that stage now, as some of the high end companies are starting to develop their own players, but still there are a lot of mass-market players out there at cheap prices which can be brought up to a very good level of performance, comparable with much higher-priced players on redbook, for a bargain price, with SACD as a throw-in, as you will. SACD is not a bust without the modifications, but it, just as redbook, benefits enormously from better power supplies and analog stages.

Virtually every CDP released in the late 80's was a mod of either the Sony stuff or the Philips/Magnavox CDB 650. Many people realized that there were improvements to be made, and that they would sound good.

Sony and Philips built to a price point. They knew that people would only pay up to $XXX, and that building more into their gear would not be cost effective.

That reason is a lot of what is happening today with SACD. People have found that significant improvements can be made without spending a ton of money. SACD is in it's infancy and as time passes improvements will continue to be made. I'm sure many of the mods available now will be standard soon.