Mr_Sukebe
Prominent Member
Having ummed, ah'd and pondered over options for frankly far too long, I finally coughed up some dosh and bought a s/h Thule SP250 processor this week.
The bad news is that it clearly doesn't support HD audio from BD disks, not that I'm amazingly worried as my ratio of SD-DVD to BD disks is around 15:1.
The good news is that:
- because it's "old tech", it was dirt cheap when compared to it's original RRP, i.e. £265
- it will still happily deal with DD and DTS, thus happily deal with BD disks downsampled to max-rate DTS
- it sounds so good that even music DVDs are now worth listening to. My previous amps (Yamaha and Marantz), typically made music DVDs overblown, uncontrolled and a bit spitty.
Additionally, it supports balanced connections, which have the potential for improving sound even further on the front channels, and it has some genuine stereo only aspirations, so might even make a half decent stereo only pre-amp (turns off the video processing to reduce internal noise).
Am I happy, damn right I am...
BTW, my thanks to Onkyo et al, who somehow have convinced people that HD audio is the new nirvana and that kit that can't support it should now be virtually worthless, couldn't have done it without you.
The bad news is that it clearly doesn't support HD audio from BD disks, not that I'm amazingly worried as my ratio of SD-DVD to BD disks is around 15:1.
The good news is that:
- because it's "old tech", it was dirt cheap when compared to it's original RRP, i.e. £265
- it will still happily deal with DD and DTS, thus happily deal with BD disks downsampled to max-rate DTS
- it sounds so good that even music DVDs are now worth listening to. My previous amps (Yamaha and Marantz), typically made music DVDs overblown, uncontrolled and a bit spitty.
Additionally, it supports balanced connections, which have the potential for improving sound even further on the front channels, and it has some genuine stereo only aspirations, so might even make a half decent stereo only pre-amp (turns off the video processing to reduce internal noise).
Am I happy, damn right I am...
BTW, my thanks to Onkyo et al, who somehow have convinced people that HD audio is the new nirvana and that kit that can't support it should now be virtually worthless, couldn't have done it without you.