Alan:

I am a few weeks from making my purchase of M60s for fronts, a Denon 3803 and a sub. I currently have a $60 Panasonic DVD player I purchased 2 years ago that also plays CDs. We use it to watch our DVD shows on a 10-year-old CRT TV (remember those). I hope to upgrade to a nice flat screen in about 2 years, when the price gets to the level I’m comfortable with.

Right now, I am inclined to use my Panasonic as my source player, till I feel I can comfortably purchase an $800 —“quality” player (i.e. Denon 2900). But lately, I’ve seriously doubted whether or not spending $800 to $1000 in a player for CDs and DVD would change the audio quality—I didn’t say video—in any way, whatsoever.

Quick background of where my opinions come from. In the past six months, I’ve observed the audio/video industry to be full of snake oil comments and suggestions from not only salesman, but also manufactures. I believe this has been caused by the simple fact that technology to produce hi-fi audio is cheaply available to all manufactures; however, manufactures need to differentiate themselves, thus they market their CD/DVD players as better quality, when in fact they probably have NO perceivable difference. I can’t prove this and have nothing to support that assertion; however, my experience in other areas—as well as computer technology—confirms this assertion to me.

You said you noted no difference in the quality between the $20K and the cheaper players. In that example, what was the player functioning as? Did it do audio AND video? How were the players connected to the Receiver? My Panasonic DVD-S35 has the optical out, that I figure would give better quality than RCA R/L. But I have no real idea just why. Could you please explain the most ideal way to connect a CD/DVD player to your receiver and explain just where D/A conversion occurs. I assume it is always at the player, but it sounds like the Receiver can do that too.

Sorry for such lame questions. I’m just trying to cut through the bull that so many manufactures and review folk give about source products.

TK