After all the gushing reviews I was really hoping the 2900 would be my new player - excellent SACD/DVDA, stunning picture, invisible layer change, no chroma bug, however I found there were a few problems:
1. R1 Alien DC DTS - player froze whenever a seamless section was reached, could fast forward through it, but stopped again at the next. Playback was faultless if you switched to DD5.1. I tested the disc on some older players and it played without a fault. Many have stated that there appears to be a problem with the Multiregion firmware and 'd have to agree.
2. Occasional lyp synch probs - every now and then synch would drift for a few seconds and then lock back in.
3. 12 Monkeys R1 SE - strange pulsing of the video. Looked like a very slow version of the macrovision shimmy. It was evident on plain backgrounds with a character in the foreground - the background would fade to a much darker tone (so a beige wall turned dark brown) and then lighten up again.
4. Monsters Inc R2 - the image appeared windowboxed, had to adjust zoom controls of my projector to fill the screen.
When these discs were played back on my old Panasonix A110 (R1 chipped for R2), none of the errors were apparent.
These glitches would just drive me crazy, and could almost expect new players to have problems with older discs that were produced in the early days, but with a curent high profile Alien disc, I expect playback to be perfect with all soundtracks.
I understand that Denon won't fix the firmware as it would appear they were condoning multiregion players, but given they wrote the stuff I'm sure they could debug it !
At the price this player costs, It's not too much to expect reliable/faultless playback.
I reluctantly returned it to my deler and am now waiting for another universal player to make the grade.