I've got a 10 year old Sony DVD Player that does the trick!
Which one is that? I've never seen a Sony DVD player with volume control (from remote, digital).
Curious, what do you plan to hook it up to?
I would have connected it to a Niles SI-275. It would be used in the bedroom if anything, so I would need a level of precision volume control.
KEW said:
I've actually got an old portable Panasonic CD player which came with remote (mainly for auto use during the transition from Cassette to CD in cars) It came with AC and DC adapters and does a nice job with pro monitors using the headphone out.
I've done that before. I have a Panasonic CD player that has analog level control and no remote. That's not particularly useful for this kind of setup. Right now I'm using this (not a picture of mine, but the same model).
It does a fine job and honestly I only recently started using it (not long after I had the thread about the CD player with volume control). It's got plenty of power for the bedroom and the CD player portion works great (tracks & reads more reliably and faster than the Teac CR-H220 I had). It does have an analog input for connecting another source, but lacks a dedicated subwoofer output. The omission of the subwoofer output is odd on a midi component of this type, but a minor issue I'm willing to overlook.
I also edited my earlier post for the Zcd to add the following:
I just checked and it has 13 bumps of the RC button to get from loudest to quietest. It actually never reaches dead quiet (but you have to be within 2' to hear anything at the lowest volume)
With my Marantz SR6001 receiver, the bottom 5 steps are uselessly low volume. I was surprised there were 4 more steps as I was going from loud to quiet, but it does offer range for different gain structures.
Also, if using this as your main volume control, another issue is it gives you no visual feedback whatsoever - there is no way to tell if you have changed the volume or whether you are at one extreme or the other (aside from how loud the sound is).
Sounds like the ZCD would never have held the right cards in the first place. I thank you for that information. I also recall you saying the ZCD ran quite warm to hot, which is another significant drawback. A little too much going on inside that small chassis for my liking, and the fact they only produced it for a year or two is also troubling. I would think if you spent a lot of time and money developing an efficient design for such a component you would want to run its production life as long as possible. The short lived production leaves an impression that the design may not have been that competent.