John,
I’m wondering if the transport can / can not make a difference though. I know for a fact that it does in video, but what about audio??
For example. Some of the video purists modify dvd players with a SDI connection to where the raw 480i data is pulled off the disk directly and then sent to the downstream video processor. The guys who do these mods search high and low for a dvd player with great MPEG decoder. A few of the older Panasonics are on their short list for this mod (and others).The new Oppo 981 and 970 are also being touted as having great decoders (they share the same decoder whereas the 971 had something different). I’m actually considering having a guy do this modification to a 981 I have. I bought a 970 because it was one of the very few dvd players that have true 480i via HDMI to send to my video processor. But I recently found out that it doesn’t send a raw data stream. The 970 sends 480i at 4:4:4 and the data on the disk is 4:2:2, so the machine is doing something to it.
So taking that into consideration, wouldn’t the same logic apply to audio?
