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Review 1 of 2
Price Paid:
$0.00 Summary:
Purchased unit new on the internet and found out from Lexicon that there is no warranty for any Lexicon product sold via the internet, regardless if the seller is a Leicon dealer or not. That being said, for the price I was able to purchase this for ($1,000), you'd be very hard pressed to find anything even close in performance and value.
I was using two differnt units to play my CD's (Acurus ACD-11 transport, Aragon D2A2 DAC) , SACDs and DVDs (Sony DVP 9000ES). With the Lexicon, I finally feel like I've found a "one box" solution. While the Sony was a good performer with SACDs, I never cared for how it colored the sound on CDs. I had pretty much accepted the fact that only analog could provide the warmth and depth of music and had spent the last year upgrading my vinyl playback components.
From the very first CD that I dropped into the RT-20, my perception changed of digital. Everything seemed to open up - the soundstage was larger, deeper and with much more detail than I had ever heard before. I "head to head" compared several vinyl recordings with the same CDs and found that in some cases the sound was as good on the CD as the record. That wasn't true in every case as some of the CD's issued in the late 80's and early 90's from second and third generation master tapes still sound bad when compared to 1st pressing vinyl copies.
SACD's played on the RT-20 also seemed to open up with more detail, but the difference was not as dramatic as it was with CD's. This could be that the Sony DVP 9000ES is a pretty good unit on its own.
The RT-20 is an excellent DVD player. I A/B compared the component output from the Sony and the RT-20 and found the Lexicon to be very good. With the enhancements that you can make on the RT-20 you can tailor the display any way you like. The HDMI output can upsample to 1080i, but I saw little difference between the quality of the 480p and 1080i on the 32" display I was using at the time.
I was unable to test the DVD-A features as I never purchased any. I can only assume that the RT-20 performes equally as well with this media.
Overall, this is an excellent universal player that is good at everything it does. Where it really excells is with standard CD playback. If you can find one new for around $1,000, its a bargin even if you only use it to play CD's. The ability to play DVD's and SACD's is a bonus.
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