I am mostly interested in audio; however, considering the Blue Ray vs HD silly battle, video is important. I have been looking at the Lexicon RT 20 But someone just suggested the Arcam 137 or 139 units. How would you compare the relative value of the two?
Watch out for the DV137 -- it was released with SACD multichannel support but was an utter failure. The multichan SACD support has been removed. I've not heard about similar troubles with the DV139.
I auditioned a DV137 shortly after it was released last year. I was interested in a universal player that was SACD-capable. The multichannel SACD failed almost immediately and within days Arcam was saying that they were no longer supporting multichannel SACD on this player. I would have been steaming if I'd bought it only to find out that it wasn't all that "universal".
Here's a quote from Arcam: "In order to optimise performance on DVD and CD playback we have decided to remove multi channel SACD playback from the DV137. We found distortion on a number of multi channel SACDs which requires further investigation but in the meantime we think it sensible to delete this feature. We hope to be able to reintroduce this later however it is impossible to give a cast iron promise on this. The DV137 can still play stereo SACDs." Regards, Andrew Dutton, Engineering Manager. ARCAM
Update To be fair, there are recent threads on avforums.com that indicate that software upgrades to version 4+ may solve the SACD problem. There are, however, comments suggesting, as the British say, "dodgy" behavior on this unit.
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