Pioneer DV600AV MultiRegion DVD Player - Silver (2 years warranty). Packaged with 1m HDMI Lead Best Buy

Why have separate SACD & DVD Audio players ? - 16 Dec 2007

3 out of 4 found this review helpful.

I've owned this DVD player for a couple of months and I am still astounded by how many functions it does. It's almost as if Pioneer can sense the end of the standard DVD player (for replacement by HDDVD or BluRay) and have thrown everything into it. For a start off there is the HDMI upscaling socket, an essential connection for those of us getting HD Ready flat screens. Sure the picture through such a connection isn't as good as HDDVD/BluRay but is a massive improvement from Scart connection. But if it's just a HDMI multi-region player you're after then you can get cheaper than this. What swung me in favour of this player is not only DVD-Audio playback but also SACD playback in the same player. You'll need an amp with 6-channel analogue input for connection from the 6 analogue outputs on the player. But boy does this player sound great once connected. There are so many menu options for set-up e.g. Speaker Size, Distance From Listener This might make it sound difficult to set up but it's not. I'm just saying that there are plenty of options to tweak with to get that optimum sound and picture. That's without mentioning that there is a USB socket on the front so you can listen to downloaded mp3 files. And the whole thing is packaged into a slimline player that won't hog up your shelf space. For the price you're getting an absolute bargain and this particular one is multi-region so should play anything.