Shawn, I have the 588A-s, and generally, I love it. It plays both hi-res audio formats, and sounds pretty good doing it. It does convert from DSD to PCM, and has an unspecified crossover point for the bass management -- it's mentioned nowhere in the manual, and when I called up Pioneer, the guy I spoke to didn't know it.
As I lack a progressive screen, I can only comment on the core video aspects of the player. First and foremost, the layer change is like lightning. It's so fast on some discs, that my receiver doesn't register even the slightest pause. On most discs, it's so fast it's barely noticeable. That's the good news.
The bad news is the player can't pass blacker than black. It's driving me nuts, frankly, seeing the occassional inky ill-defined blob on the screen. While the 578A has a firmware/hack fix, the 588A doesn't as yet. In case you're interested, somebody on another forum "fixed" the BTB problem by setting the player to interlace and his display to 1080i and found that the "dead" areas in the blacks were gone and the picture looked great.
One minor gripe is the lack of a "random" button on the remote. To enable random playback, i.e., for audio discs, you have to go into the player's menu. And random won't work at all on mp3 CDs, so that sucks.
Playback of DivX files is pretty good. Load times are a little slow, but I can forgive that when I see the video quality of DVDs (blacker than black notwithstanding).
Overall, I'm quite happy with the 588A. I got it for only $150 Canadian (about $123 US), which is dirt cheap. Good solid player, with a few downsides, but otherwise, a player with which I've very happy.
cheers,
supervij
