Why talk poop...move along if not interested.
The only poop here is what you have for sale. This is a product definitely in the Audiophool category. For one thing SACD is dead to dying. It was the fist multichannel disc format, but it would have been better PCM based. DSD is virtually impossible to work with in production. Anyone working with it now has to convert to PCM and back to DSD. The whole rationale of DSD was a total misunderstanding of digital audio, and actually conceived from colossal ignorance on multiple levels.
As regards that player it depends on the version. Early ones had significant failures and owners had to send the units to Japan for service! So fairly soon, the transport was replaced with a cheap one, that was more reliable , but no price decrease.
Balanced output has no advantage over RCA and unless the cable is very long.
It reminds me of a remark by the founder of Hyperion, the late Ted Perry. He once remarked that the ability of a player to play discs is inversely proportional to its cost.
I was reminded of this when working on a minor problem with a friends Mac disc player. I found that the transport was the cheapest level Sanyo! So obviously they agreed with Ted Perry.
On this forum we pride ourselves on steering members away from overpriced gear that offers zero advantage over cheaper products. Your player is right in that category.
Lastly most members here connect their digital disc players via HDMI, or other digital cable, to their AVPs or AVRs. So all they need is a player that will reliably read the disc and send it in a digital stream. And yes, error correction actually is perfect until the point of drop out. That is a point lost on the Audiophool fraternity.
This is the truth and not 'poop' as you put it.
