Universal Player + Blu Ray

Alex2507

Alex2507

Audioholic Slumlord
I've got a Denon 1920. It plays DVD-A and SACD. I would like to know if any of the Blu Ray players out there play both these audio formats.
 
Alex2507

Alex2507

Audioholic Slumlord
That sucks. Now that I think about it, it seems unlikely that it will ever happen at an affordable price in an all in one unit due to the DVD-A and SACD formats never really taking off.
 
j_garcia

j_garcia

Audioholic Jedi
Well, Sony players definitely won't ever be playing DVD-A... I don't have a problem with these two formats dying off if they replace them with something better that doesn't require special hardware: I have no problem listening to music in lossless PCM, TrueHD, DTS-HD, etc...as they should yeild the same quality as MLP and DSD.
 
S

swestbom

Audioholic Intern
We are a small minority I want that too but no such luck

I've got a Denon 1920. It plays DVD-A and SACD. I would like to know if any of the Blu Ray players out there play both these audio formats.
All the vendors seem to want to sell us a new "universal" player with hdmi 1.2 and a blu-ray player w/o SACD and DVD-Audio (although this is really dead, SACD isn't). Why sell one box when you can sell two, what an improvement!

If you want a new universal player sans blu-ray with HDMI 1.2 and quite good dacs and surrounding components for analog output as well as digital get the Pioneer Elite dv58-av, it has the Burr Brown PCM-1796 dacs (same as the Denon 3930ci has) which are only bettered by their PCM-1792 dacs (only in the top of the line Denon universal player) and it is only $500, half the price of the DV-79avi it replaces with its older 1738 dacs (6 db improvement in the signal to noise ratio), an older top of the line dac from 2002. This allows you to get the best out of SACD and DVD-Audio w/o getting a brand new HDMI 1.3 receiver.

Another disturbing trend is all the Japanese brands are releasing 2 channel higher end SACD players with either the 1792 or 1796 dacs but no better multi-channel ones. Why would I go back to that! There seems to be this attitude that high quality, multi-channel audio only discs don't matter.

The only blu-ray player with SACD (no DVD-Audio) is the PS-3 but all DSD is converted to LPCM before going to the dacs or to the HDMI outputs. Sony dropped DSD support entirely in their receivers in the U.S.

Even Marantz is going to sell a $2k plus blu-ray player without SACD or DVD-Audio (same as the Denon under the covers)
 
S

swestbom

Audioholic Intern
SACD lives! but as a niche product

There are dozens of releases each month, almost exclusively classical music and jazz, more classical than jazz though. Given the high quality audio of SACD but the lack of any DSP for it acoustic music is the only place it makes sense. Orchestral music is the perfect showcase for it. No sound mixing, no compression, no closely miked instruments on different tracks mixed together on a computer. SACD and DVD-Audio are a complete waste for pop, because of it being assembled on a computer with very compressed dynamic ranges so it sounds good in a car or iPod so there is no audible benefit to DSD over mp3 except for surround and you can get that with DVD-Video disks using dolby digital.
 
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