Denon AVC-A1D - upgrade?

[IanS 01]

Evening.

I have the above amp. Was £2k 10 years ago and an awesome machine. Recently took it into a hifi shop to listen to it against a decent £2k stereo amp and it did not disgrace itself by any means.

I want Dolby TrueHD (is it that much better sound than Dolby Digital and DTS?) and can't decide whether to upgrade the amp or buy a blu-ray player with onboard TrueHD decoding for the amp's 6 channel in.

Assume money not too tight but clearly don't want to waste it.

Any thoughts?

 

[Mark.Yudkin]

Since the AVC-A1D doesn't have HDMI audio inputs, you need a BD player with onboard decoding and 8 channel DACs to support the Denon's 7.1 in. But since the BD player is doing all of the processing, it also needs to deal with he minimally required functions of speaker distance setting and basic bass management. The other functions of the AVC-A1D can only be obtained by a new amp.

Although a suitable BD player can be obtained at a sensible price, IMHO, after 10 years it's time for a replacement amp.

 

[kdp99]

Another half way option is a blue ray player like the Samsung that re-encodes the HD sound tracks to max bit rate DTS, this would work with your Denon, is cheap (£100) and according to most reports is only just less in quality than using an HDMI connection.

 

[IanS 01]

Not aware of this Sammy player. Are you saying there is a third way to get TrueHD?

 

[dante01]

Not aware of this Sammy player. Are you saying there is a third way to get TrueHD?

You'd get a higher bit rate DTS than what you usually get on DVDs, but still not as high as the native HD audio.