Best Blu-ray player for non HDMI 5.1 A/V receiver

[MikeFL52]

Originally Posted by miester

Now that there is a winner in the format war, Blu-ray players have sparked my interest. This is strange because my son has Sony PS3 an over a year ago I bought Black Hawk Down on an I was extremely impressed with the picture quality of the movie. The problem lies with my a/v receiver it a older 5.1 non HDMI receiver an I cannot receive the new audio formats that Blu-ray offers. I was wondering if someone or anyone could steer me in the best direction on a Blu-ray player. I really don't want to at this time or in the foreseeable future buy a new receiver if I can avoid it. I'm sure there a lot of people who have faced the same dilemma and if this question has already been asked I apologize because I 'm new to this site. If anyone could give a hand I appreciate it.

If you want all the codecs (including TrueHD and DTS-MA) there isn't a player available right now. The first will probably be the Denon DVD-3800BDCI in a couple of weeks to a month. IMHO this will be the best analog out (non HDMI) player as it appears to have very high end audio processing including advanced bass management. It is however $1999!! The next after that will probably be the Panasonic BD50 which will be significantly cheaper (probably about $600 -$700 at a guess), but I do not think the audio side of it will be as good as the Denon, to some extent you get what you pay for. In the June timeframe the Pioneer DBP-05FD will be available at a price probably somewhere around the $900 mark. Now non of these players are 2.0, for that you will have to wait till about October for the Sony S550, price is supposed to be around $500, but thinking about all the problems there have been with bluray players (and software) to date, to me it seems that profile 2.0 just adds the opportunity for more issues and firmware upgrades and to do exactly what, I am still not clear.