I have seen that player up close, it's a tank (it's very heavy and way overbuilt). I have not heard it being used, but the specifications, reviews, and it's looks all lead to a win. It has decent scaling abilities (great in it's day) but the HD-A35 should trump it in scaling prowess. If you mainly wanted it for music (as you said) then I think you hit the jackpot. It should handle SACD, CDs and DVD-Audio fantastically. A reminder, the Onkyo DV-SP1000 does not support High resolution MLP Lossless and DSD bitstreams over HDMI. It will support High resolution MLP Lossless and DSD bitstreams over Firewire and can also be processed internally and output over the 5.1 analog outputs.