Video Asylum

Posted by Dalton (A) on May 29, 2007 at 19:02:45

In Reply to: RE: Doom and gloom, gloom and doom posted by Duilawyer on May 28, 2007 at 07:54:06

$569.99 through Amazon.

I got the HD-A2 from Best Buy and love the video quality. Even standard DVDs, upsampled to 1080i and displayed on a 106" screen via an Optoma HD70, look very acceptable. HD DVDs look great at my projector's native 720p. My problem with it was the sound. Since I don't have an hdmi-capable receiver (does anyone yet?), I could only use an optical link which downgrades the sound significantly even on standard DD and DTS soundtracks compared to my Denon DVD-5910. With the optical link, the A2 sounds no better than "good" FM radio through my system. And of course, you need the hdmi link to access the high resolution tracks available on HD-DVD.

I looked at the A20, but it too does not have a way to access the high definition soundtracks without an hdmi-capable processor, plus no digital coax output. So I got the HD-XA2, which has 5.1 analog outputs which will carry the high resolution tracks (decoded by the player) to my Denon AVR5800 external inputs. Plus, the XA2 has 1080p resolution for the future when I upgrade the projector.