I am thinking very hard about buyng the AYRE C-5xe and would like any owner or anyone who has experience with it to PLEASE give me their impressions of its tracking ability, reliability, sound, manufacturer support, or anything else that could affect my decision to buy. Has anyone had to send one in for repair, and what was that for and what was the service experience like?

This is a fairly major financial outlay for me, and I want to make sure I am not going to be sorry about it in a year or two (or sooner...).

I am currently using a SONY SCD-777 and the performance is very good for regular CD as I feed the digital output to a THETA PRO BASIC 3 converter which has balanced outputs to my AR LS-26 preamp, but for SACD I must use the unbalanced outputs direct to the preamp and I think I am not getting great performance there; SACDs sound fairly good, but I am pretty sure there is a lot more sound quality to be had there and the AYRE, with its direct balanced outputs for all modes, seems to promise a major improvement.

I would really appreciate feedback from any owners or those who have used it enough to have something they can share.

THANK YOU!!!