With an earlier gen BD player YOU CAN STILL WATCH THE MOVIE, PEOPLE. Even new titles released after this deadline. While these interactive features add an incremental value to the home entertainment experience does anyone still recognize the core value of either of these new formats being the actual MOVIE TITLE itself? Not viewing two video and audio streams at the same time.
And honestly - being an Early Adopter means desiring and accepting bleeding edge technologies with an awareness that "early" means "not mature." Every new idea, technology, and format is not without its own bugs to work out in its infancy; including the DVD format when it was first introduced.
It is pretty expensive even for a flagship piece, but it does sport some truly impressive specs. Most impressively, Pioneer engineers spent three years teaming with the Bang & Olufsen group in developing a completely custom ICE amplifier module for this receiver. 1400watts of it that is flexible enough to be bridged to 7x200 or run multiple zones. So, this is not an off the shelf module.
With a price tag as high as this it is an easy conclusion to go out and buy separates, especially considering this level of consumer (or installer), but buying the same quality in separates would be much more expensive than $7,000. Take a second and do a search for amplifiers using ICE technology and I think everyone would be surprised! Not only that, but Pioneer used the "separates" philosophy when designing this receiver. Basically, the pre-amp and amplifier are on separate chassis with only a ribbon cable connecting them internally. Not only that, but everything within the pre-amp has its own dedicated board. For those that know DACs, I think Wolfson is among the chipsets inside if my memory serves me correctly?
Oh, and that cool little screen on the front is an LCD which allows one to preview video and access menus without using an external display!
Jeff N., while this player supports DTS-HD Master over HDMI, none of the new SONY players support DTS-HD Master Audio...not sure if that affects your decision making.
It plays CDs, as well as internally decodes advanced audio (minus DTS-HD Master) into PCM for transmission over HDMI or analog, for all the legacy receivers out there.
Let the hive mind of Engadget get that for you.
"I have a MacBook Pro and an Xbox 360 and I would like to get a 20- to 24-inch display that will support both devices. The speakers should be inbuilt, or there should be an aux out on the display to hook up external speakers. Help! Please!"
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