I've had this player for six weeks, using it daily, and there a few good things about it and also some awful things.

First the good points: The sound and the picture are fantastic. I A/B'd this unit with a sony from a couple of years ago and the sound on the yamaha is more clear with a broader range. The picture I got on my LCD was stellar, better than anything else I've seen.

It will play anything. SACD's sound great, the converters are great. Same for DVDA's. CD's sound great. The unit is multi-region with an easy hack and conversion from PAL looks great. I've tried a lot of upsampling players and this has the best looking picture of any of them, even divx files burned to DVD's look great.

So that's it right? Sound and picture, what else do you need? Well, you actually have to use the thing. There are so many usability and ergonomics problems with this unit I'm having trouble puting them in order.

1) The unit is SLOW. It comes on slowly, opens slowly, spins up slowly, reads the type of disc slowly, changes discs slowly, bring a book because this thing is a turtle. DVD's get read a little faster than other types of discs, audio discs or digital discs can take up to a minute.

2) The transport and disc exchange system is the dumbest thing I have ever seen and the main thing I hate about this unit. The transport doesn't come out all the way, and doesn't spin to allow you to put discs in all of the slots. You can access slots one to three when you open the transport, but four and five only come half way out. If you want to put discs in them, you have to slide the discs along the plastic of the transport and risk scratching them. It's only a matter of time.

3) There is a work around - you can start playing a disc in slot one, press the 'exchange' button, then load the discs in the other four slots. You can watch the opening credits or listen to the first song.

4) While you're doing that you will notice that half the buttons are UNDER THE TRANSPORT and you can't reach them. You might also try to read the led display and notice that if you're more than six feet away, you can't.

I don't like workarounds on a unit that costs this much. I want to load it with discs and walk away. I bought this as a music player as well, and having been able to listen to discs on shuffle for a really long time, I'd like to be able to do that without waiting forty five seconds in between songs while the player gets it's act together. All in all the user experience here is grim, so one star with a bonus for sound and video quality, and the ability to play anything.

I'd just like to add that I had a similair experience with a Yamaha reciever, miserable ergonomics and manual, great audio quality. Seems to be ther way of doing things.