Cost effective mods for a Sony SCD-777ES

I agree with Tvad and Drubin. Use the SCD 777 as transport (excellent one).
I use mine for transport and use an out board DAC with excellent result. With the cost of mods, you can get a good DAC such as Musical Fidelity Trivista, or a tube DAC easily.
This way also give you the flexibility down the road if you like to change the dac for different sound.

The Sony DAC is not a gating factor. With clock replacement, power mods, & a swap of output stages to VSEI or buffered RAM coupling transformers, the 777ES will approach SOTA.

SOTA has many different flavors these days as a quick listen to the variety of SOTA digital players will reveal. Using an external DAC is the easiest way to experiment with different flavors.

However, replacing the clock and upgrading the power supply on the Sony would be beneficial to it's function as a transport.

Also forgot to mention the transport cap upgrade; I would do that along with the clock. IMO the Sony DAC is still considered one of the best and not the weak link here.

Chuck

I have an SCD-1 with the Sperclock and transport upgrades. The addition of a Sonic Frontiers Processor 3 provided a substantial improvement in Bluebook performance. I might add that any mods performed will probably not prove to be a good investment at resale time.