Quote:
Originally Posted by mbenz7846
thought I may be able to save a few bucks with the 3000 if they are very similar...
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It's going to depend on what your idea of very similar is. Off the bat it is clear that the SA3K and SA5K are much more similar than they are different. They have the same eye-opening level of detail and speed, and roughly similar sonic character. But based on brief (so far) listening I believe I do find the SA5K substantially more satisfying.
Background: I received a used SA5K today, and have had a used SA3K for three or four weeks. Both are, I believe, well broken in, though I imagine not equally broken in. I haven't had much listening time on the SA5K yet, but thought I'd post what I'm hearing so far in case it's useful to you.
I am a big lover of detail, so I was immediately impressed with the SA3K when I got it a few weeks back. It beat even my CD3K and ER-4S in delivering detail and as "the thing to listen to if I'm having trouble making out the words." But after more extended listening, I became rather uneasy with it: there was a definite "something missing" feeling in its reproduction, as if some harmonics that should have been there simply weren't. Under all the detail and goodness that I liked was a feeling that things were a little wrong...off...incomplete.
In addition to that, I was unsatisfied with the SA3K's bass. I am not a basshead (for example I don't mind the K501's bass lightness much at all), but the SA3K's midbass has a sound that to me is not merely somewhat weak, but oddly incomplete (there's that word again) in a way I found a little distracting. As for its low bass, I found it weaker still, to the point where I don't even have any particular impressions of its timbre to report.
Listening to the SA5K I do not have that feeling of incompleteness in the timbre. Instruments sound much more "like themselves," and the experience overall is pretty noticeably better. Bass is much more satisfactory, though this is still, I feel, not at all a basshead's can.
Here's a sort of impressionistic comparison of the two: going from the SA3K to the SA5K is like watching a sci-fi film from the '90s and then watching its sequel from a few years later: the '90s film looked plenty great, but when you hold it up against the sequel you can see that the newer film's effects crew had the means to put lots more detail and grime on the ship and lots more texture and subtlety into the CGI environments. In the newer film there's less of a gloss on the simulated reality, a little more "realism" in the fake reality. That's a little bit like the difference between the SA5K and the SA3K.
I'll post an update later on after my impressions have had a chance to mature a bit.
