Denon DVD-2900

SACD and DVD-Audio
During the last few years two new audio formats has quietly entered the Danish market. The market shares of DVD-Audio and SACD are still quit insignificant though, and you will not find any records in the mainstream record shops.

But why now these new audio formats? Wasn't the CD adequate”
Many would probably say yes, but without question the new audio formats has a far greater potential than the +20 year old CD. Both SACD and DVD-Audio delivers music in up to 6 channels, and in a resolution far beyond that of CD. But let’s face it – The reason for the introduction of these new formats is hardly a sign of generosity on behalf of the music industry. It’s more likely a result of the expiration of Sony and Philips CD patents and the declining music sales world wide.

Until now SACD and DVD-Audio have been fighting a format war to take over role that CD has benefited from the last 20 years. The war is still going on, but this year's dramatic increase of universal players that play both formats, has put a damper on the war. Universal players are possible because the two formats are not at all as incompatible as VHS and Betamax were when they fought a video war a long time ago. They both use an ordinary DVD to store data and the differences are exclusively a software issue, at least when we talk about the storage media. Afterwards, when the players read the data from the discs, SACD treats data radically different than the PCM based DVD-Audio.

Denon DVD-2900
The last universal player to be launched on the Danish market is the new Denon DVD-2900, which also is one of the first DVD-players to include progressive PAL (more on this later). Apart from being able to play DVD-Video, DVD-Audio and SACD, the DVD-2900 also supports the following list of formats/medias: DVD-R, DVD-RW, VCD, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3, Kodak Picture CD and Fujicolor CD.

The reference equipment
An effective and simple method to assess sound quality is to simply listen to a variety of music and asses the degree of satisfactory the sound as a whole provides, but just to put things in perspective it’s also a good idea to have some reference equipment for comparison.

Sony DVP-NS900V boasts a very high quality/price rate.

In our case the SACD reference consist of the Sony DVP-NS900V – a very successful SACD player at a very reasonable price. The DSD chip, CXD2752R used by the Sony is the same as used in Shanling's $3.000 tube SACD player
The DVD-Audio reference consists of Rotel's RDV-1080 – one that has proven to be a top DVD-Audio performer. It also serves as video reference because of its ability to output a progressive NTSC signal.

Rotel RDV-1080, MSRP $3.000

Some will perhaps wonder why the NS900 isn’t used as an additional progressive NTSC reference, but the reason for this is that the European NS900 units had their progressive feature removed (bummer:-(.

Video
We better confess right away: This test does not include TV picture quality. The DVD to TV combination was only briefly tried and all the DVD players delivered a beautiful picture. A projector is far more revealing than a TV, and furthermore its ability to accept all kinds of video signals makes it an ideal progressive NTSC/PAL tester.

Panasonic PT-AE100 uses a native 16:9 LCD panel.

The projector used in this test is the Panasonic PT-AE100. When calibrated right, the native 16:9 LCD panel of the PT-AE100 is able to disperse beautiful widescreen pictures.
Actually we have an additional video reference, a so called HTPC (Home Theater PC). In contrast to the DVD players, which delivers the progressive signal using the component output, the HTPC delivers a RGB signal through a VGA output that is (per definition) always progressive. The Panny really thrives on a signal delivered by a HTPC, perhaps because the HTPC can send a pixel-to-pixel resolution (856x480)… no conversions needed on the Panny.

Well, now that we’ve got that in place, lets go on to take a look at the picture quality