Wouldn’t
it be great if you could just go out and buy the surround sound music titles
you’re interested in without having to worry about whether they’re on DVD-Audio
or Super Audio CD (SACD)? Well, if more companies put out players like Pioneer’s
DV-47A, the format issue will eventually be a moot point, and we can all get
back to focusing on the artists and the music rather than on whether we have
the right type of player.
What’s so special about the DV-47A, which hails from the company’s upscale Elite series? For starters, it will play any video or music disc you bring home, whether it’s a multichannel SACD or DVD-Audio disc or a standard CD or DVD. And if that’s not enough to get your attention, the player will also spin CD-ROM or CD-R/ RW discs containing MP3 audio files — a feature that is becoming almost mandatory for DVD players in all price ranges these days. As usual, the MP3 capability is accompanied by a number of restrictions on the file and disc formats, such as being able to play files recorded only in the first session of a multisession CD-R/RW. If you want to delve into this further, visit Pioneer’s Web site and look up page 9 of the owner’s manual.
What about the new recordable DVD-R and rewritable DVD-RW discs? Although the early version of the manual we had implies that the DV-47A will not play them, I found the opposite to be true. The player had no problem reading both kinds of discs, and it will play DVD-RWs not only when they’re recorded in standard DVD-Video format but also when they’re in the editable VR format produced by Pioneer’s own DVR-7000 recorder. It’ll even play discs recorded in the Philips-backed DVD+RW format.
| KEY FEATURES |
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DIMENSIONS 16 5/8 inches wide, 3 7/8 inches high, 11 inches deep WEIGHT 9 1/4 pounds PRICE $1,200 MANUFACTURER Pioneer Electronics USA, Dept. S&V, P.O. Box 1540, Long Beach, CA 90801-1540; 800-421-1404; www.pioneerelectronics.com |
Other video-oriented features include a host of fine-tuning adjustments suited to the critical videophile. For example, you can select among presets for CRT, plasma, and “professional” monitors to make sure the player’s outputs are optimally matched with the visual characteristics of the type of video display you have. There are four video noise-reduction adjustments: for luminance, color, MPEG block noise, and MPEG “mosquito” noise. Finally, you can store all of your video settings — including those for esoteric adjustments like gamma and chroma delay — into one of four memory presets. This is a very handy feature, which can be used to save preferred settings for different types of program material or different monitors. For my tests, I used the CRT preset to match the monitor in our lab.
Hookup and setup were fairly straightforward. I was able to obtain unusually good speaker balances since the DV-47A has individual channel-level trim controls that can be adjusted in 0.5-dB steps — a welcome refinement on the too-coarse-for-perfection 1-dB steps provided with most other players and A/V receivers. (A half-decibel imbalance between, say, the front and surround channels can move finely calculated sound effects to the wrong positions.) The speaker-distance compensation — essential for the most precise imaging, especially among the front channels — operates only with multichannel DVD-Video and DVD-Audio programs but, unfortunately, not with multichannel SACDs.
In setting up the player, I found that the DV-47A performs limited bass management for both DVD-Video and, somewhat surprisingly, SACD playback. You can select “small” speaker size for the surround- and center-channel outputs, which imposes a set of high-pass filters on those channels. That sends deep bass to the sixth of the player’s set of multichannel analog outputs, which is labeled “Subwoofer” and also used for the LFE (low-frequency effects) channel in 5.1-channel soundtracks. (The DVD-Audio and SACD formats have six full-range channels, and it’s entirely up to the record producer how many channels to use on a disc and what kind of signal to put in which channel.) Why you can’t select “small” for the front left/right speakers is beyond me, since many home-theater speaker systems use satellites for all five main channels.
When it comes to DVD-Audio playback, there is neither high-pass filtering nor bass redirection. Like it or not, this is the way bass management is (mis)handled on the vast majority of DVD-Audio players now on the market. If you use satellite speakers and are concerned about the possibility of compromised bass performance, one solution is to select subwoofer “on,” change all of the speaker settings to “large,” and feed the player’s six analog outputs to an outboard bass-management box, like Outlaw Audio’s ICBM-1 ($249). The other solution is the one I adopted for our listening tests — use large speakers all around that can reproduce a reasonably full range, plus a subwoofer for whatever deep bass the producers put in the sixth channel.
My
listening sessions yielded impressive results with every disc I tried. In a
word, sound quality was stellar, with measurably and audibly clean reproduction
that benefited all kinds of music — especially complex multichannel textures.
There are no better examples of this than my favorite demo DVD-Audio disc, the
Mode recording of electronic music by Morton Subotnick, and the often equally
spectacular new multichannel SACD of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on Telarc.
(Even if you don’t know the piece, you’re sure to have heard the opening and
closing choruses, “O, Fortuna,” which have been used in many movie trailers
and commercials.) The razor-sharp clarity given to the Orff’s mixed and children’s
choruses, vocal soloists, and huge orchestra with enlarged percussion section
was in keeping with the tight, dry, high-impact sound quality Telarc provides.
It also encouraged live playback volume. Play both these discs loud.
On the visual side, I had absolutely no complaints. The video quality through all of the DV-47A’s outputs was state of the art in detail and color reproduction. The can-can scene in my current favorite demo DVD movie, Moulin Rouge, is a splendid example. Images delivered via the progressive-scan component output looked particularly fine, especially on a large screen. This was true even with a few older movies, like the recent DVD releases of 1982’s Tron (Disney) and 1984’s The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (MGM/UA), a parody sci-fi action-adventure flick with a literally electrifying performance by John Lithgow. Play these for fun, and check out www.banzai-institute.com on the Web.
With the DV-47A, Pioneer has demonstrated that it’s possible to build a truly universal DVD/SACD player that delivers top-quality performance on all of its audio and video outputs. If your system can compensate for the DV-47A’s bass-management peculiarities, either with an outboard bass processor or a receiver like Pioneer’s current top-of-the-line THX Ultra2 model, you’ll get all there is to hear and see from any disc you put into its tray.