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152.163.101.10
I bought an HD-A1 from BB the saturday before there were supposed to start selling them.It has a decent build for a 500.00 player, as well as a decent look.
The player was about as loud as my pc...which is a 2 year old average Dell.
It has a great picture on hd dvd...but it was a bit soft, and not as sharp as the better d-vhs titles....but definitley better than sd dvd.
The audio, at least on all the first Warner titles when played via coax or optical is DD+...which has too much bandwidth evidently so it is output in some higher than normal bit rate DD....but the kicker is that everyones gear reads it as DTS...which is not even on the discs.
When hooked up via coax/optical...its down 15db from the sd dvd version at the same volume setting.When hooked up via anolog 5.1 or hdmi, the DD+ audio is an improvement over even double bit rate DD/DTS.
It is still down a bit on db via analog or hdmi on Warner titles...but no were near 15db...probably 3-4db at the most.So you can get better video and audio out of these players using analog/hdmi...and only the 1080i setting regardless of your displays native rate.
The problem for me was that its very finicky with hdmi errors as well as very sensitive to hum via the analog 5.1.
Mine never frooze during playback like some have said, but it did freeze up while trying to start a movie twice.
The player while in hd dvd mode, will revert back to the beggining of the movie anytime you push menu/stop, or basically any function other than pause.
So it does not remember were you left off in the movie as claimed, and in my case, not only did the player start the movie from the beggining, it also made my pj re-sync with any function other than pause/play.I never tried one of the few Universal titles available, but there said to be at the correct db level....which could cause you to damage your speakers when switching from a Warner movie and using optical/coax as your connection.
On one rental sd dvd disc, the player would not play it, so I opened the drawer and tried again.
This time it asked me whether I wanted to check the hd box...or dvd box, evidently thinking I had an hd dvd hybrid disc, which are not even out yet.
The players are slow at everything including loading, playback, advance chapter ect....and I mean slow as in 2.5-3 seconds for chapter advance....and what seems like quite a few minutes to go from off, to playing an hd dvd.One pleasant suprise was the sd dvd playback, which looked just shy of my previous Denon 3910, and current Onkyo sp 1000 for picture quality...with normal audio playback via optical/coax.
I may have missed a few quirks...but these were enough to negate the picture quality as well as the DD+ sound via analog.
I just kept thinking what new problems would I run into with this thing in the future.
Many people seem to keep them despite suffering all, or most of the same quirks...so I guess I was not chomping at the bit as badly after all.
I am going to wait for Blu Ray ...and possibly buy another hd dvd player down the road if Universal still doesn't support BLu Ray at that time.
If I do end up with another, hopefully most or all of these quirks/problems will be gone.Greg
Follow Ups:
I've never had this issue with any other player regardless
of cost & I was not happy when I heard The HD-DVD Debut was a Tosh. I stood clear, guess I'll get the Blu's...
I was always planning on supporting Blu Ray...but just wanted the hd dvd for Universal titles...and rentals until I could buy into Blu Ray players and movies.
HD DVD ...just doesn't have the support of studios with around 42%, and Blu Ray having around 90%.I also beleive that if one format dies out, it will most likely be hd dvd for several reasons including not so great Toshiba players, the PS3 putting millions of Blu Ray players into average homes that will not buy stand alones from either format for years, and of course the most important reason....a lot more movies on Blu Ray.
It will require HDMI 1.3 to send any of the new codecs natively (undecoded) via HDMI. If you use the TOSlink or coax output, the DD+ will be decoded in the player to PCM and then converted to DTS via the Toshiba's onboard encoder (Toshiba chose this method to get multichannel via the TOSlink/coax digital connection on their player).The low sound is due to two things: #1, the ball was dropped in the QC department and #2 in order for the audio not to clip when those asinine button activated sound effects are combined with the movie's audio, the audio level for the movie had to be lowered (you can thank Warner Bros for that useless/irritating crap).
The load times are slow due to what's needed for startup (lots on the checklist). This, combined with the fact that there's some discontinued Intel Pentium chip in there for processing -- which was slow for computer use, gets you a long wait time.
Joe,
What exactly was I hearing via analog 5.1 that sounded so good...other than it being down a few db?
Was this DD+ as I was assuming?It was definitely the best sound I ever hear as far as movie soundtracks go...with an almost discrete cleaner sound with more bass impact.
If DD Tru HD and DTS-HD are going to be even better sounding than this down the road via hdmi 1.3....were in for a treat imo.
I hate to have to wait until September to get the Panasonic Blu Ray player that is evidently the first announced player with hdmi 1.3....or who knows how long for an hd dvd player with 1.3.
To change this on any of the other players would require a hardwae upgrade...no?
There won't be any hardware upgrades to HDMI 1.3 (not only the HDMI chip, but various internal processing is different).I don't know what the defaults are for audio, but you should be able to pick from a few different audio codecs.
The Panasonic player may or may not feature HDMI 1.3, as two HDMI chip manufacturers have said it may be Q1 07 before they're ready. If Panasonic wants HDMI 1.3, they will either have to wait or manufacture it in-house. There's only a few manufacturers that I would trust to do it in-house correctly : Panasonic is one of them.
Personally, I don't think we need all of these different audio formats. Both DTS-HD and Dolby Digital TrueHD offer a lossless soundtrack along with a backward compatible lossy soundtrack. With a decoder in the player, the output can be analog through the analog outputs and digital (PCM) through the HDMI 1.1 output. HDMI 1.3 will allow the undecoded soundtrack to be sent via HDMI to a receiver/processor with an HDMI 1.3 input (if you so choose). If you want to use the TOSlink/coax digital output, the lossy track can be sent this way. Voila -- you've satisfied everyone. Why do we need any of the other audio formats?
I hope that HD and True HD are superior to CD quality.Hopefully they are the equal to DVD-A, and that's why DVD-A is being phased out.
We clearly need something superior to Dolby Digital (DD).
I'm more excited about the audio possibilities, than the video. In fact, I hope one becomes the standard.
DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD are both lossless formats. In fact, Dolby TrueHD is actually MLP (with a few little changes). Both are superior to CD (which is 16-bit/44.1kHz). However, it's up to the content provider as to how superior the soundtrack is. For example, The Phantom of the Opera (HD DVD) has a 5.1 Dolby TrueHD soundtrack, but it's 16/48. What asshole at Warner Bros (the antithesis of quality audio) made this fucked up decision? The minimum acceptable standard for High Resolution audio is a 20-bit wordlength at a 48kHz sampling rate.The DTS-HD stream provides both a lossles soundtrack and a lossy soundtrack (for backward compatibility). The Dolby TrueHD stream also provides both a lossless soundtrack and a lossy soundtrack for backward compatibility. If the content provider uses DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD, no other format (Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, PCM, etc) is needed. They are just bloat!
I am happy with DD+..and I am sure any linear pcm audio that happens to be on some Sony discs down the road.
One other complaint about the HD-A1....it clips blacks via hdmi, which is supposed to be the defacto standard...or so you would think.
This just proves once again that Toshiba is nowhere near "the first name in quality". I heard about this a few weeks ago and the first thought that came into my mind was, as Kramer (CNBC's Mad Money host) would say, "Don't buy! Don't buy!". That revelation made purchase of the Toshiba HD DVD player a no-brainer: Just say NO!Given this, it's pretty ironic that Toshiba spent a great deal of marketing money in promoting the better picture quality attained when the complete video signal is available to the display (especially below black video) nearly a decade ago when DVD first emerged. I applauded them for doing so back then, but they now need a kick in the ass for being so irresponsible with this screw up at HD DVD's launch. What makes matters worse is that their HDMI DVD players were hammered on this very subject when they were released.
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