Denon 2900: Another day, another DTS dropout! (1 Viewer)

[John H Ross]

Okay, now I'm frustrated.

I live in England and I've tried two multi-region Denon 2900 players over the last 3 months.

The first player had serious problems. It made an almost constant whirring sound, like it was searching for data, during DVD playback and the DD/DTS sound dropped out at least once on every movie. DTS was particularly bad. I tried connecting it to my Yamaha DSP-A1 amp via both optical and coaxial cables. Same result. It went back.

My replacement player has performed perfectly until about a week ago. I watched I, ROBOT (DTS, R3) last Thursday and it was perfect. However, COLLATERAL (DTS, R1) dropped out 3 times during the second half of the movie and, tonight, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (DTS, R1) dropped out once about 45 minutes from the start. I believe that some have experienced probs with the R1 version of I, ROBOT too but, as I indicated above, my R3 disc was okay.

Each time the audio drops out, there's no signal drop reported by the amp. That is, the "DTS Surround" indicator stays lit and does not revert to "Pro Logic" indicating that the data stream is not being interrupted.

I'm starting to get very annoyed.

I've heard from a few people with similar problems. With regards to COLLATERAL, one person used a Denon 2900/Yamaha combination (thou not the same model Yamaha) and suffered dropouts. Somebody else used a different make amp with their Denon 2900 and it played fine.

I'm also hearing dropout problems when reading reviews of Denon's new 3910.

Is this purely a Denon fault? Or is it a problem with its relationship to certain amplifiers (e.g. Yamaha and/or amps which are 4-5 years old or more)? Is there anything we can do about this (request a firmware upgrade) because it's just not good enough.

I'm going to run a test. I've set my player to do all the decoding internally and then send the processed signal out to the amp via the aux analogue (phono) cables. Hopefully this should take the amp processor out the equation so, if the problem persists, I'll know it's the player. I'll give LOTR: ROTK (DTS, R1) a spin tomorrow night.

I reeeeeally don't wanna lose my 2900 because I love it. I especially love not seeing layer changes!

Would anyone else like to share their experiences?

John

PS. This amp worked perfectly with my old Sony 7700 player for 4 years.

 

[Mark Basile]

I had a Yamaha receiver and IT, not the DVD, was the problem with DTS dropouts. My advice would be to check out a different amp with the Denon to be sure.

 

[John H Ross]

Hi Mark.

Thanks for that. Which DVD player did you have when you had your problems? And which Yamaha amp? And where the dropout random or did they appear in the same place each time?

John