[Gadjet]

Just quickly reading through a magazine on their opinion of pioneer 747, which I am waiting for. It said for DVD-A and SACD that you need 6 phono leads from dvd to amp. Is this true? and secondly, if so will I still need my optical connection as well?

Cheers phill

[ian_guinan]

DVD-A and SACD are only allowed to be output from the player as multichannel analogue signals. (unless you count some ultra expensive exceptions from Meridian, a digital link from Denon which will not pass copyright DVD-A material and only works with their amp, and the up&coming Pioneer firewire link, again only particular amps/players).

Even if you could pass a digital signal, there aren't sperate multichannel decoders for DVD-A and SACD (again with notable exceptions).

We are therefore meant to connect our 5.1 audio from the player to amp by analogue cable. I just bought quite a neat Ixos one (sorry can't recall the code for it) tha does the job very neatly. Otherwise use 3 of your favourite quality interconnects.

Having a digital connection is handy to use your usual Dolby and DTS decoder for movies,esp. for amps with 6.1 (DTS-ES etc) reproduction systems (which are not decoded by any DVD-A or SACD players I know of).

If possible you want this to be a 'direct' input that passes the higher bandwidth signal without messing it around. On Denon amps this is supplied as 'Ext In' and likely your amp will have a similar function.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Ian Guinan

p.s. Did you know the 747 was due to be replaced very shortly (757?).. may be some bargains to be had if you've set your heart on this player.

I've got the Sony 700 DVD/SACD player and I have recently connected it up to the ext decoder input on my Yamaha amp using 6 phono cables to play the demo disks. At the time I hadn't got a Toslink or SP/DIF cable spare so I've been using this link for DVD playback.

Yesterday I connected it up with a fibre optic cable and ran a quick comparison test on a music DVD. The fibre link sounded very different. I haven't decided yet whether or not it's better or worse but will give it a longer test when time permits.

The thing is, I seem to remember reading on this forum that the sound quality of the decoder in the amp should be better than the quality produced by the decoder built into the DVD player. I would have perhaps doubted this, especially on a higher end DVD player. All I can say is that the first impression was that the fibre gave a fuller sound, sort of warmer and softer.

What are you views?

DaveP