I Need Advice On A Home DVD Player...

WeekendWarrior · Post by **WeekendWarrior** » Thu Oct 04, 2001 6:35 pm

I still dont have a dvd player for the home theater.
Money is kind of tight right now with the wife being sick and both of us were off work for a while, so I want to find a unit under $300.00 Canadian.
Winter is coming and I want dvds!
The Player MUST play cdr's, vcd's and MP3's.
Today I saw the Toshiba SD - 2710 for $279.00 cdn + 15% tax
Pioneer DV-440 for $299.00 but no gst so only 8% tax
HitachiDV-415 $269.99 + 15% tax
and the Panasonic dvd RV31K $289.00 +15% tax.
The Pioneer sounds very good and it has dual lasers not sure about the others.
Panasonic plays mp3's but I guess it cant play them random only in alphabetical order.
I want random mp3's cuz my billiard room is a level below the stereo and i want to load a mp3 disc on shuffle and play pool for a while without changing cd's every 45 minutes or so.
Toshiba is supposed to be good and it has cd text which I like.Pioneer does not for sure.
Not sure if its needed or not.
The dvd features are similar on all units.
any advice?
thanks

poop · Post by **poop** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 8:53 am

I have a toshiba SD-2600 and I dig it. It has some letterboxing issues, though. The compression done to fit an anamorphic DVD down to a 4:3 ratio introduces some artifacts in copmlex scenes with lots of detail, but they are only noticable if you are picky (like me

)

Overall, it is a good unit. It's colors are nice, and the CD text is nice, as well. The Toshiba also has HDCD, and that is a bonus if you use it as a CD player.

I am sure that the one you are looking at is probably similar.

WeekendWarrior · Post by **WeekendWarrior** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 9:17 am

What is HDCD?
The CD Text is that on the tv screen? or the front panel of the dvd player?
thanks for the info

poop · Post by **poop** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 9:44 am

CD text can be shown on screen. There are 4 different display modes on my player, and 2 of them show the text. It always shows text on the display.

CD's are encoded using 16-bit resolution PCM @ 44.1 kHz. That basically means the sound wave is represented by a 16 bit value which is updated 44.1 thousand times a second.

HDCD is a way for companies to get pseudo-20 bit performance out of a CD. It isn't truly 20 bit, but is pretty damned close. I am not sure how they manage to do it, but it does work, and there is an audible difference. Quite a few CD's are encoded with HDCD, and you probably own a few and don't even know it. Just look on the CD or the CD case, and you will see a little HDCD logo. Whenever I pop an HDCD into my DVD player, a little icon pops up.

The only bummer is that you have to use the DACs built into the CD player if you want HDCD. Very few low end (sub $500) recievers have HDCD decoding built in. So if you use digital out, you won't get the HDCD decoding. If you use regular stereo out for playing CD's then you get the benefit of HDCD, but the DAC's in your DVD player may be inferior to the DACs in your reciever.

WeekendWarrior · Post by **WeekendWarrior** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 10:04 am

Thanks again.
I was just reading about hdcd here
http://www.hdcd.com/about/index.html
But it doesnt look like the mp3 models have that ability.

WeekendWarrior · Post by **WeekendWarrior** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 5:41 pm

Thanks guys well I bought the pioneer
Pioneer DV-440 for $298.99 TAXES INCluded !
I think I got a good deal, it played everything very well.
Tried the Toshiba in a store and it choked on some vcd's on a cdrw and the mp3's were popping etc. they dont do that in comp or the Pioneer.
Gotta go I'll let you know how I like it later.
WW