I bought the HD-A2 from WM today. FW version was 1.3 and the unit was manufactured in March, '07. I downloaded FW version 2.5 onto to the A2 and put in SD version of Master and Commander projected at 720p through a Panasonic PT-AE900U to a 102" screen. Having watched this movie a dozen times through the Oppo 981 (also set to 720p), I immediately noticed that the upconversion through the A2 was better. There was more detail, less grain, and better/brighter coloration. I doubt that my wife can tell the difference (will need to coax her into the HT room for AB testing this weekend), but I am fairly confident that if someone else did the switching of the players in an AB testing, I can tell these units apart with this movie. I can't wait to rent an HD-DVD movie and see what that's like.

I have not compared the audio between the Oppo and A2 with this DVD. Of course, the A2 does not have SACD/DVD-A, but A2 re-compresses the decoded audio from DD+ and TruHD soundtracks into 1.5 megabit per second DTS streams - the highest datarate that is supported by SPDIF. Since my integrated amp does not have HDMI, I need the SPDIF and the A2 should sound at least as nice as the Oppo with a DVD. The big question in my mind now is whether I should buy the HD-XA2, which has the Reon HQV video processor, a 12-bit 297 MHz (vs 11 bit/216 MHz in A2) video dac with 4x oversampling and HDMI 1.3 output. I read from a post elsewhere that the video with XA2 does look better than with the A2, if you have eagle eyes. Perhaps Homedad, who has the XA2 and now has the A2 can give us a comparison when he can.

John

John
Our HT