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A jack-of-all-trades is a master of none.
Pioneer, Marantz, Yamaha, and Onkyo now have universal disc-players on the market. Are you interested?
Multi-channel audio is a gimmick that has nothing to do with music. SACD and DVD-Audio have digital watermarking and copy protection which purposely distort the sound. Most recordings made are in PCM. Pro-Tools, the most popular recording program, doesn't support SACD nor DVD-Audio.
I purchased a Pioneer player. It's good having access to both formats now, no matter which one wins out. I do favor the Sony and Philips SACD after hearing several discs in both formats. I feel it's much closer to the anolog sound that I miss so much!
Yes, I'm interested. SACD (which I've heard) knocks the spots off regular CDs, BUT I'm sticking to two-channel for the foreseeable future (no space for extra speakers; any new-format player has to be really good at old-fashioned Red Book CDs, I'm not throwing my collection away; and vinyl is still incomparable!
I have a Sony mini disc player (3ES) that will not play some of the discs that I have gotten. It will not read the TOC on the prerecorded discs. It will play fine on my personal. It realy pisses me off that I paid those blood suckers for my music only to have it not play on my home stereo due to copy protection.
I had a multi disc DVD player once. Althogh it wasnt high end, it still had alot of problems. I think that when you add soo many features with new technology it creates the right enviroment for things to go wrong. Lets keep things Simple!
None of the options deal with the real issue: that excess video circuitry in players degrades audio performance. I would expect for the foreseeable future the best bet for those people interested in SACD/DVDA is two players, with zero video circuitry in the SACD player, to provide decent legacy CD performance, and a DVD Audio player that at least has a "video circuitry off" option.
The SACD seems pretty cool, it has yet to prove its better then CD though. plus my cdp is hi-end, and 106db SN ratio. one thing about muti-channel music, is it will be hard for a person in to vintage audio, to incorapte it, I'd have to get a processor, then use my vintage amps and vintage speakers to use everything.