Hi-fi bargain alert! Grab this Marantz Super Audio CD player half price while you can

(Image credit: Marantz)

Looking to get in on the CD revival hi-fi brands keep shouting about? Love the idea of being able to play high-quality Super Audio CDs (SACDs) as well as basic CDs? Then this Marantz SA-12SE deal may be just what you’re looking for.

The deal is live on Peter Tyson now and lets you grab the Marantz SA-12SE for £1599, a 50 per cent saving on its £3199 regular price.

This is the lowest price we’ve ever seen the Marantz SA-12SE sell for. Prior to Peter Tyson’s latest discount the lowest we saw it retail for was £2195 all the way back in May 2023.

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The only slight caveat is that we haven’t had the unit in for testing yet, so we can’t personally attest to its audio quality.

However, given the deep discount and positive experience we’ve had with other recent Marantz players, including the Marantz SA-10 – which earned a perfect five-star rating when we reviewed it in 2018 – we are comfortable flagging the SA-12SE deal for our readers' attention.

The Marantz SA-12SE is technically impressive, being built on the Japanese audio brand’s proprietary SACDM-3 mechanism – which is bespoke made in-house and designed to optimise performance for both CD and SACD.

The inclusion of Marantz Music Mastering also lets it function as a DAC and play PCM signals up to 384kHz/32-bit, along with DSD256/11.2MHz.

For those unfamiliar, SACD is a specialist physical disc format launched in 1999 that was jointly developed by Sony and Philips that is designed to offer higher resolution audio, multiple channel support and longer play times than basic CD.

We’ve seen a number of other players supporting the format, including the even more premium, £11,650, Esoteric K-05XD we awarded five stars to in April, appear this year.

If that doesn't tempt you don't worry. Though the yearly Black Friday sales event doesn't officially begin until the end of November the Marantz discount is one of many early deals to have already appeared.

We’re expecting a series of hi-fi savings to continue to appear over the next month in the run up to the big day. We’ll be keeping track of all of them in our main best hi-fi deals guide, so make sure to keep checking back with What Hi-Fi? regularly.

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Alastair is What Hi-Fi?’s editor in chief. He has well over a decade’s experience as a journalist working in both B2C and B2B press. During this time he’s covered everything from the launch of the first Amazon Echo to government cyber security policy. Prior to joining What Hi-Fi? he served as Trusted Reviews’ editor-in-chief. Outside of tech, he has a Masters from King’s College London in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion, is an enthusiastic, but untalented, guitar player and runs a webcomic in his spare time.