I LOVE the sounds of multichannel (NOT ‘multi-channel’) Classical and big-orchestra film music and have many hundreds of SACDs and a few DVD-As and Blu-ray Audio discs. I’ve never invested the money in what some, nose stuck firmly in the air, would call high-quality source equipment. The best I’ve had are the various versions of the upper-end Oppos, all the while using their DACs for MC-analog into the preamp.
I’ve now had for more than a year new Marantz A/V preamps, first the '7704 for a few months in '17 and '18 and for about a year the top-model '8805; with both pieces I used/use HDMI out to the Marantz which does the digital decoding. Think what you wish about using an A/V preamp in an high-end audio/video system, but the sound quality is so good that it was among the reasons I upgraded several other pieces in my system last and this year.
Last year I convinced myself to finally buy hi-end front-end equipment and settled on the Memory Player and DS DAC. I asked questions here and directly to PSA personnel and learned that I could get full-multichannel sound in four channels (that is, without the center and ‘.1’ channels) from these two pieces, with the two front channels running thru the DSDAC and the surround channel running thru some other DSD DAC. All the while, I assumed that the Memory Player wasn’t STUPID and could fold the CC info into the left and right signals when you told it you weren’t using a centerchannel.
Well…STUPID is me, too; there’s no such thing as assigning the CC into the left/rights. Since the CC carries a lot of signal in the MC discs I listen to and I do not choose to listen without such info, I am now resigned to buying TWO lesser-expensive DACs, and the ‘Jr.’ is NOT in my price range for surround or CC use.
Any recommendations for DSD DACs that retail for lots less than a grand and that do NOT have timing differences with the DSDAC? One candidate I found quickly is the NuPrime DAC-9.