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Review 1 of 9
Price Paid:
$225.00
from private party (broke Summary:
Smart people don’t rush to purchase a car if it is in the first year of production nor do they use any Microsoft product until at least a Service Pack 1 is available. Unfortunately this approach holds true for the high-end consumer electronics, especially the AV equipment that heavily relies on the digital components. When Denon DVD-9000 first appeared in 2002 it brought both high expectations and a few annoying problems. It was a hold no barrels attempt from Denon to humiliate it competitors in the high end DVD players market. And Denon largely succeeded, putting aside some laser pickup quality control issues in the early production run, presence of the “chroma upsampling bug” and/or Y/C delay, and a necessity to upgrade the “Denon Link” along the road to be able to play the copy protected DVD-Audio discs. By the time all these problems have been fixed Denon rushed into production DVD-5900 to keep up with the competition offering the DVI outputs, discontinued the DVD-9000 and later built DVD-3910 to compete with the latest players with HDMI outputs. Unfortunately, the later Denon models scarified on both the build quality and parts quality, and used the Faroudja FLI-2310 deinterlacers/scalers instead of the Silicone Image chip (all recent players utilizing the Faroudja FLI-23xx deinterlacers/scalers are plagued with the “macroblocking” artifact).
There are not too many reviews of the DVD-9000 with the latest hardware/firmware upgrades installed so I decided to fill in the gap.
I have a first-hand experience with two Denon DVD-9000 flagship DVD players. I bought my player used (barely). It was broken – did not respond to the “power” button and the original owner sold it to me for peanuts. Well, his loss - after replacing the internal fuse the player came back to life and I’ve been enjoying it for a few months now.
The second DVD-9000 I know was bought by a friend of mine “B-stock” (refurbished) from eCost.com for $1300 (and this included shipping and additional 4 years warranty!) after he saw my player in action. His unit arrived in the original Denon packaging with the manual and all accessories. We spent quite some time trying to find any cosmetic flaws but could not. No scratch or scuff, no a spec of dust, not even a fingerprint!
I new that DVD-9000 is built to last and weights 40lb, but when I opened my unit for repair I was astonished by the build quality and attention to details. The multi-layer case panels (to reduce the vibrations and EMI), the copper plates separating different circuits, the separate power supplies for digital and analog signals, the audiophile grade capacitors, resistors and DAC’s, you name it… If I had space, I would have replaced the top cover plate with glass and left the player on the top of the rack just to display its guts….
It appears that the designers of this model spent quite some time lovingly finishing the subtle nuances of the human-to-machine interface. When you operate the DVD-9000 you get the same feeling as when riding an expensive luxury car and it shows everywhere. You know what I mean – try to close the door in Ford Taurus and then do the same in Lexus and you would feel the difference even in a sound these two cars make when the door is closed, right? The disc tray in Denon “glides out” so smoothly that I catch myself spending a few minutes now and then just opening and closing it. The feeling of the buttons on the massive black aluminum faceplate is just “right”. The menu navigation speed is the fastest I’ve ever experienced (even the well acclaimed Denon DVD-2900 seems sluggish in comparison to DVD-9000). The layer change is never noticeable. I could go on and on, unfortunately no words can truly explain the feeling I am trying to convey, only the first-hand experience would.
Our players have never exhibited the “chroma upsampling bug ” and the latest firmware upgrade took care of a Y/C delay. As a bonus the new firmware (kindly sent to me from England by another DVD-9000 aficionado) made our players the multi-region ones and enabled the PAL progressive output.
The players so far have played any disc we tried – DVD’s, Video CD’s, recorded DVD’s and Video CD’s, DVD’s with the programs in PAL and in NTSC, DVD’s from region 1, 5 and 3, discs scratched quite badly which other DVD players just could not read, DVD-Audio, etc. No hiccups… Speaking of the recorded DVD’s, it did not matter what color the surface of the DVD-R was. Strengths:
My DVD-9000 is connected to AVR-5803 through the “Denon Link SE” and I get the excellent multi-channel sound from both Video and Audio DVD’s with no need to use the analog connection. My friend does not have the Denon receiver so he uses the excellent Burr-Brown DA converters built into the DVD-9000 and he admires the sound too. We both have the hi-end amplifiers (I use my AVR-5300 as a pre/pro and to power the surround speakers only), cables and speakers and can attest that both the Redbook CD’s and DVD-Audio disks sound as good while using the DVD-9000 as when playing them in some much more expensive separate dedicated transports.
The video quality of this player is, probably, the best of any DVD players ever made (and we tried a lot of them). My player is hooked up to a calibrated Mitsubishi WS 55807. My friend’s unit feeds the Panasonic PT-AE700U projector (the image is displayed on 100 inch screen in his HT room). One would argue that since DVD-9000 does not have the DVI or HDMI outputs it might be inferior to the latest crop of the DVD players. Not so fast. Marketing hype aside, multiple independent observations published in the AV press failed to prove that the image quality obtained on the properly calibrated end device differs significantly between signals fed through the component, DVI or HDMI inputs. Note the key words “properly calibrated”, though…
Anyway, DVD-9000 uses one of the best video DA converters for it component outputs – the 108MHz 14-bit chips from Analog Devices. This not only allows for 4x oversampling of the progressive signal but also permits better signal processing due to the wider bus (remember older 16-bit PC’s and how they compare to the current 32-bit computers?) thus improving the dynamic range and significantly reducing the noise level. Additionally, the AD conversion happens after the digital signal goes through one of the best deinterlacers on the market – the Silicone Image Sil504 chip free from the “macroblocking” artifact Weaknesses:
Does not have a screen saver mode, other then that I can not come up with any more weakness. Similar Products Used:
We compared DVD-9000 with DVD-3910 side-by side both in my and in my friend’s systems (and we tried to hook up the DVD-3910 to his projector both through the component and through the DVI and HDMI connectors). I feel bad for DVD-3910 and all it owners after this comparison; the DVD-9000 wins this competition hands down. When we watch a movie using DVD-9000 we feel like watching the movie in a movie theater. When we watched DVD-3910 the artifacts in the dark areas made this experience painful on my CRT RPTV and absolutely intolerable on the triple LCD Panasonic projector. We also looked at the older Toshiba SD6200, new Pioneer DV-59 AI, Momitsu DVD player, Panasonic RP82, Denon DVD-2900 - all "usual suspects" while doing this comparison (it is god to have friends who are willing to land their equipment for the tests like this...). We liked the DVD-9000 much better then anything else.
I look at DVD-9000 and it reminds me of Sony DVP-S7000 and Sony DVP-S7700. These Sony DVD players stand out as a benchmark of build quality and video signal quality even now, so many years after they have been introduced. I know many people who SDI modded them, use them with the high-end deinterlacers/scalers and claim that they will never replace them until new HD-DVD finally comes out of the woods.
I have the similar take on Denon DVD-9000. I feel I will be using it for SD DVD’s both until and after the HD DVD’s become widespread and when there are no SD DVD’s left around then it will still be beating up everything else as a Redbook CD transport
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