My Pioneer DV-868Avi seems to have spontaneously given up the ghost, with the buttons no longer causing anything to happen except a slight juddering noise from within. I'm going to have a look inside the Pioneer later today, specifically at the mechanism which is I think the cause of the noise in case it is something simple that even I can fix, but I think I am looking at the possibility of replacing it outright.
So, do I get another DVD player (a s/hand Pioneer 989) or do I plump for one of these new fangled blu ray devices of which I have heard speak? TV is an HDMI equipped Pioneer plasma which is used exclusively for playback of spinning silver discs (no TV aerial connection to worry about), sound is at present provided by a Yamaha 5.1 amp into a mixture of 5 Epos and Acoustic Energy speakers. This system also acts as source of CD playback downstairs so gets used in 2 channel mode for a fair bit of the time and I have been contemplating dumping the surround sound entirely, and just replaying films via a Quad 44/405 that I have sitting idle. The question is therefore what blu ray players offer brilliant multi region DVD playback (I assume that is quite a lot of them) via HDMI, are excellent on CD/DVD/blu ray playback via their RCA phono outputs, and which are ideally silver in colour (to match the TV connection box)? Budget is as low as is realistically possible for comparable (though ideally better - I don't ask much...) performance to the 868Avi?
So, do I get another DVD player (a s/hand Pioneer 989) or do I plump for one of these new fangled blu ray devices of which I have heard speak? TV is an HDMI equipped Pioneer plasma which is used exclusively for playback of spinning silver discs (no TV aerial connection to worry about), sound is at present provided by a Yamaha 5.1 amp into a mixture of 5 Epos and Acoustic Energy speakers. This system also acts as source of CD playback downstairs so gets used in 2 channel mode for a fair bit of the time and I have been contemplating dumping the surround sound entirely, and just replaying films via a Quad 44/405 that I have sitting idle. The question is therefore what blu ray players offer brilliant multi region DVD playback (I assume that is quite a lot of them) via HDMI, are excellent on CD/DVD/blu ray playback via their RCA phono outputs, and which are ideally silver in colour (to match the TV connection box)? Budget is as low as is realistically possible for comparable (though ideally better - I don't ask much...) performance to the 868Avi?
