Price Paid:  $1300.00 from Crazy Eddies

Summary:
I purchased the Pioneer Elite primarily because of my confidence in the Elite line. I currently have a Pioneer DVL 700 combi player for LD’s and DVD’s, and a Daewoo DVD 5800 region-free player. I use these DVD players on my 120” front projection screen. Consequently, monitoring video quality is quite easy. Audio is much more subjective through an eleven speaker 5.1 system through both my Denon AVR3300 and an external 5 channel amp. I am very happy with the system. Now to the specifics of the DVR 7000. This is a very well constructed unit from observation. I find both the audio and video fully satisfactory. However, unless it also recorded, the price would be impossible to justify. But at recording, it does very well. I feed it everything from DVD’s from apple to discs costing only $1.50 ea. It seems to handle them each with equal aplomb. Out of 100 or so recordings, I have only had two or three failures. I would attribute them to substandard media, as they were visible marked on the recording surface. One recorded successful after I cleaned and polished it. So the recorder seems to be pretty versatile. Now to a couple of drawbacks. The inputs are analogue only. That is too bad, but I guess that is the agreement the industry has accepted. This is not necessarily a negative if you are converting a batch of stereo video tapes you want to preserve, but my THX and DD 5.1 laserdiscs won’t be superceded until I can get digital. The recordings from the videotapes actually appear better from the recorded discs. I don’t fully understand why, but they do. It may have something to do with my projector, I don’t know. Also, I don’t seem to suffer the artifacts and dropouts on my recordings that I often encounter on expensive commercial DVD’s. I must admit, I really cannot hear much difference between stereo recordings in analogue versus the digital original. Obviously, 5.1 digital is a different matter, and of course those old mono soundtracks from old movies don’t suffer at all. Finally, the DVR 7000 has stumbled loading its own recorded material on occasion. Reloading normally overcomes the problem. Strangely, the recorded discs seem not to cause any problem ever on my other DVD players, although my sister had problems with a TV broadcast I recorded for her on her old (and not very good) DVD player. I have noted loading problems on my 7” portable player, but that s

Strengths:
Records on any media I can find and improves the quality. Good job on both DVD-R and DVD-RW media. Plays in most DVD players from DVD-R

Weaknesses:
A little expensive Expensive DVD-RW media Analogue inputs

Similar Products Used:
LD and Combi players from Denon and Pioneer, plus Marantz (BAD), JVC, and Daewoo DVD players.