Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater What's the best DVD Audio/vidio player under 500?

Just to play the devil dancing on your shoulder: the new Denon 2900, retailing at a mere $850-1000, is widely hailed as the dream machine of the moment. See, for example, http://audioholics.com/productreviews/avhardware/DenonDVD-2900-reviewp1.html. So it's a BIT more expensive than the 2200. What's an extra $300 where fully adjustable bass management is at stake? Heh heh heh heh...(Vincent Price laugh).

IMO, the very best way of DVD-A/SACD bass management is having the digital i.Link connection and letting the receiver (not the player) to do it to your heart's content. I am waiting for the price of i.Link-savvy players to come down from the current "high-end" range.

FireWire! It's called Firewire!!! (IEEE approved name for 1394)

Hear, hear! That's what I'm waiting for, too, and that's why I decided to "go cheap" for the time being with the new Pioneer universal player, especially since moving to a all-digital-out DVD-A/SACD player will probably also involve moving to a new receiver (my archaic Denon doesn't have an iLink jack). Once a cross-manufacturer iLink option emerges (right now, as I understand it, iLinked players and receivers must come from the same manufacturer), I figure the 6-channel-analog-out-from-the-player format will go the way of 8-track and Beta. Here's hoping, anyway.

That is one big plus of the higher end HK receivers, they have digital bass management on the 5.1 analog inputs. Yes.....their must be quality loss in the extra conversion step, but I think it is better bass management than most of the DVD-A/SACD players.

Right, Ken... and of course, the principal inventor and shepherd of FireWire/i.Link/IEEE1394 is Apple.

Damn, didn't mean to let it show.... :-D

After NuBus, Apple really redeemed themselves with Firewire.

In reply to:

---

the principal inventor and shepherd of FireWire/i.Link/IEEE1394 is Apple

---

Yeah...but its growth is because of its availability on PCs.

I worked for Xerox for over ten years and saw so much technology that could not be capitalized on because they would not license it to others. I think the PC would be dead if Apple allowed the cloning of their hardware.

If the general public knew what Xerox had in the mid-eighties, what we have now with Macs and Windows is no big step forward.

I second the Nubus comment. Firewire was a heck of a step forward after that mess.