I went ahead and bought the Onkyo receiver. It won't up-process component to HDMI but I don't really care about that.

For those who wonder what going from DVD to HD-DVD, and I assume Blu-Ray is like, here are some thoughts:


1) The receiver is very easy to setup. Easier than the HK AVR240 I used to have. You do need to asign HDMI to the DVD selector but that is easy enough to do.

2) The receiver only says HDMI when watching Batman Begins. It is at the movie level you select the audio you want to hear. With the DVD playing, you press menu the menu button. The movie continues playback and the menu slides up into the letter box bars. The audio tab has selectors for True HD, DD+ and I think, DTS. Toggling between them causes the audio to temporarily cut out so I am very certain I am hearing True HD once it is selected.

3) Sound quality. I can't really tell a difference between Dolby True HD and Dolby Digital 5.1 that I normally heard. But I am not an audiophile and unless I can switch back and forth and to a really good A-B comparison, I'll probably never know. This is not what I would call a detriment. Also, Batman Begins would normally be around 65 on the volume level with the SD version. The HD version needs about 75 to be comfortably loud. I have heard this is the way Dolby True HD is so it isn't a reflection of the player or receiver.

4) Picture quality. Noticeably better than with ordinary DVD. If you ever went from watching Discovery Channel non-HD nature programming to Discovery HD theater, you saw a picture improvement tough to put into words. A massive improvement to say the least. HD-DVD is no where near as big a jump and I watch on a 106" screen with a Sanyo Z4 front projector. The difference is certainly there and worth the upgrade, just don't expect to see the SD tv to HD tv difference I described above. People's faces look a lot less fuzzy than on the regular DVD and you may not notice just how fuzzy your old DVD's looked until you upgrade. Text and graphics are a night and day difference and I am sure the Antarctica DVD I have on order will be more impressive than "just a movie." I tend to think that cinema is about mood and story telling whereas documentaries are all about a gorgeous picture.

The only negative so far is the A2 player. When you press the stop button, you are supposed to be able to press the resume playback button to be able to get playback to start where you left off. That button on my remote doesn't appear to be working so each time I would stop the movie, I had to start it from the beginning again.

The 604 receiver gets high marks overall. The only oddity is that when I jump from one chapter to the next, it loudly clicks for some reason. I think it is because the HDMI signal is temporarily lost and it looks for it elsewhere. A second later it comes back and clicks back again. I may be able to fix this.

All of this is based upon the first 30 minutes of the movie and a little bit of going back to the SD-DVD version of Batman Begins. I am now going to watch the rest of the movie and see if I can get the clicking to go away. More later.

Greg


Greg