Pioneer DV-563A Review (1 Viewer)

[Gary_D_Ottawa]

My 563 is connected to my receiver via both Digital out and 6 channel analog. How do I set the receiver to output DTS/Digital out signals TO the digital cable and not do the processing internally and then send the signal over the analgo connection?

 

[Drew_W]

Gary, I'm not quite sure what you're asking. The reason for having both is because the processing in your receiver is probably superior to the 563, so we use a digital cable for that purpose and we use an analog set of cables since that is the only way we can output a dvd-audio or sacd signal. You then simply switch between the six-channel input mode and the mode to which the digital input has been assigned (or is permanently assigned to). In any case, I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but both connections are outputs from the dvd player into the receiver...

Perhaps you could explain what you're trying to do, if the above didn't answer your query adequately.

 

[David_Fr]

Thank you fro the research Gary. That really is going beyond the call of duty. That is what I was hoping to hear.

 

[Gary_D_Ottawa]

When playing a say movie with a DTS track, I don't get a signal from the digital out, only from the 6 outputs, so the player is doing the DTS decoding.

 

[Fredric]

This "observation" was posed on August 4 by Shawn, but no one followed up on it:

All the movies that I tried looked kinda 'grainy', including Monsters Inc. (Which I use as a reference for testing picture quality).

I, too, have noticed this. I was watching Treasure of Sierra Madre, and I noticed a bit more "film grain" than usual. Pausing the DVD pauses this excess grain. In the scene where Tim Holt rescues Bogie from the mine shaft, the grain went wild in the darkness.

I put in Bug's Life DVD, since it's a digital transfer, and noticed just a little bit of grain, but there shouldn't be any, right?

I'm assuming that I need to change a setting somewhere, one either the player or tv, like sharpness, picture, etc. Probably a simple fix. Does anyone have suggestions?

 

[James Tg]

I bought 563 at BB yesterday. BB is having 10% discount through 11/26. The list price is $170.99. I pay $163 tatal including tax for a piece. I auditioned it a couple of hours last night. It is an amazing unit vedio wise and audio wise with the price. No regret at all. I will keep this piece for a while untile I find a true high end universal player with reasonable price in one year or two.

James

 

[Steve_AS]

When playing a say movie with a DTS track, I don't get a signal from the digital out, only from the 6 outputs, so the player is doing the DTS decoding.

On the player menu:
See page 54 of yoru manual, 'Initial Settings'.
'Digital Audio Out' submenu
Make sure Digital Out is set to "ON"
DTS set to "DTS" (not DTS-->PCM)

On the receiver (which I assume has a DTS decoder built in):
make sure you are using the digital input

On the DVD menu:
Make sure you really have selected the DTS soundtrack of the movie.

 

[Steve_AS]

Unfortunaley, that is a two channel recording, therefore there is no .1 channel, and thus BM does not normally have any affect. The 563 may in fact do BM on 2 CH stuff, but many players do not.

I'm coming very late into this...

Brian, with the player set to 5.1, the DV-45a definitely does BM (of the speakers-to-sub only variety) on hi-rez two-channel (designated 2.0 or 2/0) material, so I would not be surprised if the 563a did as well.

If a player is set to output 2.0, but not 5.1, then *that* may be why people believe the player can't do 2.0 BM. A player needs to have an available .1 output in order to do BM on 2-ch material. PLaying 2.0 material with a 5.1 setting effectively makes a player '2.1'.

 

[Steve_AS]

With 5.1 DVD-A vs. DD on the same disc, no BM, and other factors normalized as much as feasible I've been able to easily identify the difference 10 for 10 blind. It's noticable in the upper registers mainly due to inaudibly high frequencies harmonically affecting the waveforms of the audible treble. That's the theory anyway.

POssibly, but it's really very important to match levels in such comparisons, to within less than 0.5 dB (some would say to less than 0.2 dB). Otherwise a 10/10 score could simply reflect mismatched levels, not inhernent audible difference between DD and DVD-A.

 

[Steve_AS]

And lastly, (for today) skimming the thread it appears no one has directly referenced the Soudn & Vision review of the 563A.

Here's a link to it -- useful especially for its 'lab test'
report, describing hte player's weird crossover inconsistencies

http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/art...article_id=509

 

[Walt N]

quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With 5.1 DVD-A vs. DD on the same disc, no BM, and other factors normalized as much as feasible I've been able to easily identify the difference 10 for 10 blind. It's noticable in the upper registers mainly due to inaudibly high frequencies harmonically affecting the waveforms of the audible treble. That's the theory anyway.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

POssibly, but it's really very important to match levels in such comparisons, to within less than 0.5 dB (some would say to less than 0.2 dB). Otherwise a 10/10 score could simply reflect mismatched levels, not inhernent audible difference between DD and DVD-A.

Steve, "other factors normalized as much as feasible" included level matching using a repeated short musical passage and an SPL meter. Not as good as a steady test tone, but I took my time to get them as close as possible and I'm certain I was within .5 dB. Like you said, failure to level match would have negated the trial.

 

[Ted Lee]

dang you guys type a lot....i just finished reading this from start to finish.

i gotta say this thread has me excited for the unit. i'll be buying one within a couple of weeks. plus s&v mag gave this their "best of the year" (or whatever it's called) in their latest issue.

on a final note, as already mentioned, you guys (especially gary) have done a remarkable job giving info and guidelines to the posters.

this thread is a pristine example of what htf is all about. great job!

edit - i noticed the model at best buy is DV-563AS. is there any diff?

 

[Tod Golden]

I may be wrong, but I think it stands for Silver. I picked one up at Ultimate Electronics (formerly Audio King) a week ago for $154.00. Not a bad price for this player.

Tod

 

[Phil VanHelden]

This is one long thread!

I may have missed it, but has anyone mentioned what DAC's are standard in this player?

 

[Dan Hitchman]

They are Burr-Brown PCM/DSD DAC's capable (or so their literature states) of decoding both formats discretely with no conversion. The audio format decoding chip is a Philips PCM/DSD all-in-one, which can output pure DSD. Where the confusion comes in is at what point does the Pioneer convert DSD to PCM.

Is it only during BM and if so, does it stay DSD-->Analog if you have the player set to read the SACD 5.1 section and have all speakers set to LARGE and Subwoofer to YES?

That is the $65,000 question.

Dan

 

[Norman Short]

I take it that there is still no changer version of this universal player or any close to this price range? I'd been holding out for a changer but this player is starting to look like Christmas.

My RP-91 Panny now wont recognize discs, although it will recognize copies of the discs on DVD-R or DVD+R media. Wont recognize most movie discs or any DVD-Audio discs. Any ideas for that? I just wonder that it's worth more to fix the RP-91 than to buy this budget player and get SACD and bass management in the bargain.

 

[Steve_AS]

Steve, "other factors normalized as much as feasible" included level matching using a repeated short musical passage and an SPL meter. Not as good as a steady test tone, but I took my time to get them as close as possible and I'm certain I was within .5 dB. Like you said, failure to level match would have negated the trial.

Actually the more I research it, the more it seems that 0.2 dB or less is the standard. Sorry.

 

[Ted Lee]

Where the confusion comes in is at what point does the Pioneer convert DSD to PCM.

can someone expound on that.

if i may...a few newbie questions.

1. what is dsd? i guess i know what pcm (pulse code modulation) is. how do the two inter-relate?

2. why is this conversion a bad thing? is it like going from digital to analog back to digital?

thx!

 

[Gary DeRoy]

OK, here's a simple answer.
DSD stands for Direct Stream Digital. It was originally a way that Sony and Philips came up with to archive music in hi quality. The idea was to find a way to save and store music in a lossless, or near lossless format. This music could then be converted from DSD to PCM for later use. It later became a way to listen to music in a hi-res format, often with a new converter that would process DSD directly to Analog. Many argue that since DSD was always intended to be changed to PCM, that it makes no difference if the signal is processed as DSD to PCM or directly to Analog.
The 563 isn't the only player to convert DSD to LPCM and then to Analog. There are at least 3 very high-end SACD players ($7000 and up) that do this, and these players are very highly regarded. The real questions should be; 1) how well does the player do the DSD to LPCM conversion and 2) does it matter how well it does it?
So, to answer your 2nd question, no, it is not the same as converting from digital to analog and back to digital. It is a digital to digital to analog conversion.
The 563 should not be underestimated. It is a very good sounding SACD player. Granted, to me it doesn't sound quite as good as the Denon 2900, but that is, in my opinion, due mostly to the superb DAC used in this Denon model.
Listen to the 563 doing each conversion method and see if you can hear the difference. You shouldn't be able to (but who knows, you might) and I, for one, admit I can't.

 

[Will_B]

I take it that there is still no changer version of this universal player or any close to this price range? I'd been holding out for a changer but this player is starting to look like Christmas.

I've been holding the same question in my mind for awhile now, but today, Best Buy was selling it for $160 and I had a 10% coupon so I got it for like $145.

Having only one disc tray is like being thrown back in time to circa 1984 when CD players were introduced.

That part of the player is terrible, but, I haven't seen any announcements for any multidisc version of this yet.

I am so glad that I bought this instead of a purely SACD player, particularly as when one looks at the available artists and titles, one really realizes how few artists are on either format! To even hava a paltry selection, you absolutely must be able to play both DVDA and SACD. (The grand total of artists I like enough to buy totals 3: Bowie, REM, and Sheryl Crow. Hopefully 2004 will bring a few more).

I have a couple comments about the player:

In the second or two between songs, at least on DVD-A (I don't have a SACD yet), the player makes two quick small noises in succesion, which I'd describe as sounding very much a hard drive being acessed (or, I guess like a CD-ROM drive being accessed, actually). It is not a big deal, more of a vibration than an outright sound, but if is not in a cabinet you may find this slightly distracting until your mind learns to "tune it out."

Second comment is that this is a very small unit. It is as wide as my other Pioneer products, but the depth is several inches less. The upshot is that when I placed this under my Pioneer receiver I needed to stick some blocks at the back (I found an empty DVD case plus an empty double-DVD case will perfectly duplicate the needed height).

Third comment: One way they've kept the price so low is by not including any cables to speak of. Well, they do include an old red-white-yellow 3-RCA cord, but that's pretty much useless. You'll need to buy your own 6-RCA cables, as well as an video cables you might need if you are going to use this for video.

Personally, I have no plans to use this as a DVD player (after all, it is not free-trade-compliant*), but one does need to plug it into a monitor to set it up (great menus for setting this up by the way, and it is essential that you do set it up).

More about the need for a monitor: it seems that most DVD-A music titles don't automatically play the music portion (they're more like DVD movies in the way that they have menus and extras and so forth), so without a monitor you may be fumbling in the dark trying to get the music to play. I imagine that in the near future many of these players will include a small, like 1" or 2", LCD monitor on the front panel so that people who don't want their monitor on when they simply want to listen to music will know what is going on.

I suspect that most DVD-As tend to make the first menu selection the "PLAY" selection, so there's a good chance that you can get away with not using a monitor in most cases.

Another observation about why these formats aren't quite ready for prime-time: Some discs, when they finish playing, return to the main menu - and these main menus may in some cases have an audio loop just like DVD movie menus do. In other words, you can't fall asleep as the disc plays, or you'll wake up only to find you've been hypnotised by a few bars of music repeating for 30 minutes (this player shuts off after 30 minutes of inactivity, it appears).

*A player which is not "Free Trade Compliant" is (in other words) crippled by the illegal Region Coding system. And by
"illegal," I mean illegal in Australia. Here in the US, we all know the score (consumers: 0, big business:1).