Well, good luck with it Rod. The Toshiba has performed like a champ
for 2 years here. Sounds like those two reviewers (out of how many
units sold? -- people never take the time to say nice things, which is
why I rarely trust "user opinions" on things) got bad units, maybe
gray goods or the like. I have an older (5+ years) Toshiba DVD/CD
player that gets used daily at work and has never had trouble.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Rod Stephens" <savecal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, July 03, 2006 3:56 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Longevity
Hi All,
Thanks to Phillip and Tom for input on the units below. I've done
some follow up research on Epinions and came up with these
evaluations on both units.
Tom Fine wrote:
Hi Rod:
Toshiba used to make an incredible little unit. I think they got out
of the SACD business. The Toshiba I have, model #SD-4960, plays SACD
quite well (not quite as well as my Marantz player, but this thing
cost less than 1/3 as much), DVD's very well and audio CD
surprisingly well (ie they didn't cheap out on the D-A converter or
the analog stage after it). I bought it after reading a very good
review somewhere. I think it cost $120 on sale, perhaps on sale
because it was being phased out.
Tom, I'm sure that this was a good unit for you, but it seems to have
laid an egg for some who have purchased it more recently:
http://www.epinions.com/pr-Toshiba_SD-4960_DVD/display_~full_specs
I appreciated your general comments below on SACDs in general, but it
looks like the Panasonic that Phillip recommended seems to currently
win out on both cost an user appreciation:
http://www.epinions.com/pr-Pioneer_Pioneer_DV-578A-S_Silver_Single_Disc_DVD_Player_Single-disc_DVD_Players_DVD/display_~reviews
However, I'm still checking out the competition.
Thanks again to both of you for your input.
Rod Stephens
I am not 100% on this, but the impression I got is that SACD laid an
egg in the mass market and thus lower-end multi-format players are
not including in this latest year or last year's models.
My own opinion is that some SACD discs sound really wonderful, and
some multi-channel mixes are worthwhile but overall it's not worth a
lot of extra expense (particularly since it's a submerging format)
and there wouldn't even have been a window of opportunity if there
were better CD mastering and remastering engineers out there. And,
since the same guys also do SACD, the same percentage of SACD
releases are really excellent (ie small percentage).
One man's opinion, etc.
-- Tom Fine
<snip>