Bryston BDA-3 accepts DSD over HDMI from the HDMI audio out for that Sony line (700 through 900). The Bryston also accepts DSD via HDMI from a PC with HDMI audio out but over your stated budget. I’ve been using the 800 for 6 or 7 years now feeding it to my Bryston which has held up as a fine DAC. Unfortunately, the Sony units are not great transports. Discontinued Oppo 1700 (as I recall… ?) also send DSD via HDMI. Unfortunately, they wrapped up their HiFi division just as I was so, so close to buying one for $1900 CDN. The final inventory sold out overnight and the used market doubled the prices the next day. Most now ridiculously overpriced. Sony owns the proprietary SACD DSD conversion technology and seems adamant on keeping it that way. Or maybe they liscen$e it so it’s out of reach for others to make viable products. I *think* Bryston’s solution uses their own proprietary conversion process, possibly similar to what PS Audio has done with their i2S solution but the brain cells I stored that data in seem to have malfunctioned. Interesting topic without a lot of great solutions. Ultimately, SACDs just never got the market traction they needed to encourage labels into making SACD releases a priority so there’s no need for manufacturers to provide SACD solutions.
Sony owns the brand-name DSD and, with Philips, has standardized some aspect of it more than 20 years ago to make a business model out of it, but there are no longer any "proprietary DSD conversion technology" and, besides, DSD is "just" a 1 bit delta-sigma modulation that can be converted to analogue as any other 1 bit delta-sigma modulated stream. Almost all significant digital to analogue converter chips from all major players in the industry (Texas Instruments under the brand name Burr Brown, ESS, Analog Devices, Cirrus Logic, AKM and formerly Wolfson, NPC and Sony) have been able to convert DSD to analogue for more than a quarter of a century. The Bryston BDA-3 uses one of this off-the-shelf DAC chip: an AKM AK4490, which has been around since 11 years.
And Sony is far from the only manufacturer that has put on the consumer market disc players that can output DSD over HDMI (version 1.2 or higher). There were and are many from Pioneer, Marantz, Denon, Oppo, Magnetar, Reavon, Cambridge Audio, Yamaha, Arcam, Ayre, Electrocompaniet, Goldmund, Lexicon, Macintosh, Onkyo, Pannde, Primare, Theta, you name it...
What is really lacking are many DACs with HDMI input. The Bryston BDA-3 is some sort of a welcome exception on that matter. But on the other hand, there are innumerable A/V receivers with HDMI inputs and many of them accept DSD and if not, DSD can be decimated to PCM by the sending device to be used by those A/V receivers.
