Epic CDP. It will cost a lot to have it professionally re-capped, but IMO there's no better starting point for a high end CDP... after the mid eighties all the real CD R&D went into making them cheaper, not better. Oversampling, upsampling etc may be paper innovations but have not convinced my ears. The TDA1541a dac chip is my faviourite ever (and lots of others agree) and you have the S1-Crown version (basically the elite sorted from the chips with the closest to ideal tolerances under test).
CD-80s can fetch quite decent money (150-200) but unless you are a tinkerer you will struggle to get better sound for the money (what I mean is you could buy a £30 Philips and make it sound very nearly as good with a bit of canny soldering). Also no modern affordable CDPs are built like this.
If it were me, I'd keep it. If I was a tinkerer (I am), I'd recap it myself and probably do a non-oversampling mod, maybe a tube output stage too. I've done both of these before on TDA1541 base players and they sounded superb.
Wish I could but I'm just too slow at electronics and nowehere near competent enough to guarantee I wouldn't bugger your lovely machine... u need a profushnul.
Epic CDP. It will cost a lot to have it professionally re-capped, but IMO there's no better starting point for a high end CDP... after the mid eighties all the real CD R&D went into making them cheaper, not better. Oversampling, upsampling etc may be paper innovations but have not convinced my ears. The TDA1541a dac chip is my faviourite ever (and lots of others agree) and you have the S1-Crown version (basically the elite sorted from the chips with the closest to ideal tolerances under test).
CD-80s can fetch quite decent money (150-200) but unless you are a tinkerer you will struggle to get better sound for the money (what I mean is you could buy a £30 Philips and make it sound very nearly as good with a bit of canny soldering). Also no modern affordable CDPs are built like this.
If it were me, I'd keep it. If I was a tinkerer (I am), I'd recap it myself and probably do a non-oversampling mod, maybe a tube output stage too. I've done both of these before on TDA1541 base players and they sounded superb.