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New DVD-Audio music releases and talk about the latest players.

RE: Late adopter Toshiba SD-9200 DVD-A

I've always lusted over the 9200's after I heard one at a friends house. It actually got a Class A rating in Stereophile (even at $1900 list, it was by far the cheapest Class A disc player). But there was a notorious problem with the 9200 drive mechanism that often required replacement with an updated washer or something like that, which could be had at one time for $19 but Toshiba denied the original was defective. Perhaps you got one of the good ones.

So instead I collected Denon 2900 and 5900's, only to find that they too are notorious for drive problems that are much more expensive to fix. I've never had one fail but one of my 5900's makes a whine on DVD-Audio discs. Both of my Denon models allow video shutdown through front panel control, but the control itself is best programmed through menu.

DVD-Audio is a great format for good sound, for the limited titles in which it is available. The format was always avoided by Sony (which had rival format SACD, and later Blu Ray) and marred by watermarking (which sometimes caused players to hang) and the fact that you often have to navigate complicated and tricky (and never standardized) menus to figure out how to get the best Stereo playback. The format promoters thought the format was mainly useful for hirez multichannel..

BTW, I generally like the higher sample rates, PCM48 never seems as good as 96 or 192 MLP, even if the latter require downmixing to stereo (!). That's my experience so far.


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