Today I went back to my Hifi dealer to listen to SA700 again. I did spend over an hour with it and SE100 to compare. I ended up buying SE100.
I also had a long talk with my dealer who knows all A&K products and has the whole palette in his shop. He agreed upon my impression that SA700 sounds inferior to Kann despite the price which is close to SE100.
I have to refine my first impressions of SA700 though: Everything is basically there, but after a long listen I found that everything in the sound signature works on it's own, separate, not as a whole.
When I compared on the fly with SE100, everything just came together. The sound was way more coherent. My dealer agreed. We both independently ranked SE 100 1st, Kann 2nd, SA700 3rd.
Additionally the SE100 apparently has the far better CPU making the UI a joy to browse. Also, even though the SE100 is much bigger, it is way lighter than SA700 and less scratch-prone
Cheers,
Tom