anyone know the cheapest retailer to find one of these? as many people fluff these units, i bet someone has shopped around and can save me the legwork
A quick browsing for the str-da3000es on froogle.com found this --
http://www.ecost.com/ecost/shop/detail.asp?dpno=654377&store=ecost&source=ewbfroogle&adcampaign=email,ewbfroogleA refurbished 3000es for $462.74
Sound of the sony es series -- I find these units' best feature to be their amazing soundstage and imaging and WARM, natural sound. I believe the digital nature of these beasts contributes to this -- if your primary listening material is digital (opposed to analog), then at a minimum, this deserves a listen. I say this because all imputs are converted to digital and upsampled to dsd (the format used by sacd). I believe that much of the sonic signature of these puppies is derived from this dsd upsampling. Note -- you feed these amps a digital signal (spdif). Thus, the cd player, dat deck, etc. merely serve as transports to feed the amp and you're in effect purchasing a d>a, receiver and amp all wrapped in 1 package.
Enough fluffing