A bigger shock came last week when I heard a friend's Sony 999, highly modified by a well-known company. In this case, the CD playback was pretty good, but the SACD was completely, utterly uninvolving. This was using single layer discs of classical music recorded in DSD to begin with. Rules out the "oh, it was suffering at the hands of outdated original recording technology" or "the dual layer thing has problems." The playing field appeared either to be level, or to favor SACD, but it lost, and badly. Yes, there was a comparison to a CD transport/DAC combo totaling identical dollars ($5k), with the same result as was obtained with the un-modded Sony 9000.

I'm being vague partly due to my business interest in one of the players in these shoot-outs, and partly because the friend will be writing a review on the Sony 999, so I don't want to steal his limelight.