I am very happy with my purchase. A fantastic component with many useful features and great quality.

although i really enjoy the quality of SACD, and it is superior to CDs by far, still, to me, there’s nothing like an analogue recording. it’s not neccessarily the warmth, it’s just when a digital recording is made, it doesn’t pick up the recording smoothly like an analogue tape recorder does, it picks it up at a rate, such as 22,000 times a second, which is a very high rate, but it still doesn’t sound as fluid as a record. that being said, this player plays my SACDs fine through my plain L/R outputs, but not the multichannels. it plays DVDs suprisingly clearly, especially since i have it set to interlaced because i have a regular television, but it puts out superb sound through both the L/R plugs and the digital output, but especially the digital output. for some reason, even though the dvd player is supposed to just take it straight from the dvd and direct it out the plug, my last player mucked it up for some reason, and it didn’t sound as good. this player seems to pick up the bass much better, and now i can turn my subwoofer down. also, i’d like to point out a discrepency in a review below this one:

“Furthermore, even conventional CDs played on a SACD player sound better than they do on typical CD players.”

i’d have to say that this is almost entirely false. even though SACDs work differently, an SACD player still reads the player the exact same way. better models of players, such as this one, if using the L/R plugs, may convert the digital signal to analogue better than an older player, but that has nothing to do with it being a SACD player. any perception of better sound besides better analogue conversion is probably just your being excited to have a new DVD player. but trust me, this one is worth getting. i’m not sure if it plays DVD-As at top quality, so you might want to check on that, but otherwise, it’s a fine choice, and it’s slim and easy to use, and fairly easy to set up. it took me 1/2 an hour to hook it up, but i was hooking up the full SACD 6 wire plugs plus the digital, L/R, and S-VIDEO connections, so that’s about normal. as soon as i turned it on, it guided me through the steps, and i was able to play a DVD less than 30 seconds after turning it on. a quality product, for sure.

As for the DVD portion of this player, it is very easy to use and has seperate buttons on the remote for rewind/fast forward and last/next chapter, so no more holding down those bloody buttons!

also, it has an HDMI output, so your DVDs will look better than ever on your HDTV, even better than the component video outputs, which are also a plus for those with EDTVs. the readout on the front of the DVD player is clear and makes sense, like most dvd players, but there is no readout on the screen while playing CDs and the screensaver is rather boring, but these are minor setbacks. this dvd player is great for those who don’t want to deal with a very complicated seven disc dvd player, but want to enjoy high definition from their DVD player.

NOTE: i change my review to three stars, because this is an excellent DVD player and is very easy to use, but the multi channel output has no bass management and sounds like it’s coming out of a tin can. if you’re expecting to use this to play mono, stereo, and surround DVDs through the digital output and L/R output, and play stereo SACDs through the regular L/R output, i’d recommend this, but if you’re expecting to use this for multi channel SACDs i would definitely not recommend this!