Toshiba SD4960 superlative sound for hi rez and for CD. Check all the favourable reviews at Audioasylum. Built in bass management for SACD and DVD-A. Unbeatable sound for the money. $100.
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Toshiba SD4960 Progressive Scan DVD Player
This REGION FREE DVD Player has a Hardware Chip Modification that allows it to play Regions 1,2,3,4,5, & 6 discs, PAL discs on any NTSC TV in addition to being able to play REA and RCE Discs!
Toshiba's SD-4960 single-disc DVD player offers near-universal optical-disc compatibility, a huge boon for budget-conscious audio- and videophiles. The player spins DVD-Video movies, of course, but also handles recordable CDs loaded with MP3 or WMA music files and discs filled with JPEG digital photos. But it also plays stereo and multichannel music-based DVD-Audio and SACD (Super Audio CD) media, letting you enjoy high-resolution music in stereo or, depending on the disc, albums specially mixed for surround-sound listening.
The SD-4960 excels in video performance, too. It's outfitted with 10-bit/54 MHz video DACs (digital-to-analog converters) and ultimate-quality Super ColorStream Pro progressive-scan component-video outputs for seamless, flicker-free images when viewed through high-definition and HD-ready TVs. Whether your living room is currently home to an HDTV or you're merely thinking of "someday," the SD-4960 will deliver the full potential of your DVDs. Progressive scanning, referred to as 480p for the number of horizontal lines that compose the video image, creates a picture using twice the scan lines of a conventional DVD picture, giving you higher resolution and sharper images while eliminating nearly all motion artifacts.
The SD-4960 also performs 3:2 pulldown reversal. DVD mastering introduces a common distortion when adjusting 24 frames-per-second movies to 30 fps video; 3:2 pulldown digitally corrects this distortion. Conventional composite- and S-video outputs bring compatibility with nearly any television.
Digital picture zoom is an interactive DVD feature that lets you select and magnify an area of a picture you want to zoom in on. Enhanced digital processing during moving video or freeze-frame playback produces high color fidelity and resolution, even when you're zoomed in. You can also use this feature to expand letterbox-only films to full-screen (4:3 aspect ratio) dimension.
DVD-Audio and SACD media both offer super-high-fidelity sound. DVD-Audio discs provide 192 kHz/24-bit multichannel and stereo sound, high storage capacity, and unique bonus materials not available on regular audio CDs. DVD-A discs often have compressed Dolby Digital soundtracks for listening on standard DVD players, but true DVD-A decoding is required for full sonic appreciation. Depending on the disc, Sony's proprietary SACD format provides extended-bandwidth multichannel and/or stereo sound, often presented in a dual-layer format compatible with both standard CD players (at standard resolution) and SACD-equipped players like the SD-4960 (for full-resolution playback).
The player performs bass management, giving you control of independent channel parameters (speaker size, delay time, etc.), including control for bass reproduction. Use this feature to customize the player's multi-channel audio output to your particular home theater.
