So Deb accidentally went out and bought an SACD of Yo-Yo Ma instead of a CD. Of course, being the geek that I am, I took this as an excuse to go buy an SACD player. There is actually a reasonable selection of various makes and models in Ottawa, but most are either too expensive or too limited in capability. I eventually found a Samsung that, in addition to playing, SACDs will also play DVDs and DVD-Audio disks. It seems to have pretty decent specs, but I won’t know for certain until I’ve got it home. In any case, $200 seemed like a surprisingly low price for something with this many features.
update: I played around with it last night. The picture quality is good — I’d say slightly better than the old one. The GUI is pretty basic though. It played everything I could throw at it: DVD with DolbyDigital, DVD with DTS, CD, SACD and DVD-Audio. The only wrinkle was that I had to plug in the analog outs to get SACD to work. This actually makes sense: It’s not a PCM signal, so it’s not suitable for writing out over the optical digital connection.
(Did I mention it has a DVI out and will upsample to HiDef? 🙂 )