Sound Quality
The Denon DVD-1920 supports both Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound. It can output these through either the available digital outputs (optical and coaxial), or through the 5.1 analog outputs.

Here's something a lot of people don't seem to understand: If you use the DVD's digital sound outputs and connect them to a receiver, then it doesn't matter if you're using a $1,000 or a $100 DVD player. It's digital data that's being sent to your receiver, and it's really up to your receiver what the end result will sound like. It always amazes me to read reviews where people claim that the sound coming from the digital output sounds so much better on player X than on player Y.

That said, the Denon DVD-1920 does offer one option to change how this digital data eventually sounds. It's called "Dynamic Range Control" (DRC) but only works on a Dolby Digital data stream. The audio's dynamic range (the difference between the softest and loudest sounds) on a DVD is pretty high, meaning that in noisy environments, you are constantly adjusting the volume up to hear the softest scenes, and down to not get blasted by the loudest scenes. DRC will compress this range so the soft scenes are louder, and the loud scenes softer. You can set DRC on or off, perhaps it would have been better to offer a few steps in between as well.

The analog 5.1 output is a whole different story however. The analog sound quality of a digital signal depends on something called a DAC (Digital to Analog Converter). Digital data needs to be converted to analog signals somewhere along the road. So, when you use the digital sound outputs on your DVD Player and connect them to your receiver, then the receiver will do the conversion to analog. If you use the analog 5.1 sound outputs on your DVD Player to connect to your receiver then the DVD player will do the digital to analog conversion. No matter who does the conversion, the better the DAC it uses, the better the audio will sound.

The DVD-1920 uses a 24-bit Burr-Brown DAC. If you're like me, you'll be like "oh, ok". Yes, I have no idea either whether or not that's an impressive DAC - all I know is that the end result is very, very good. Ordinary Audio CDs sound a whole lot better than on my CD Player, making the DVD-1920 now my preferred playback device for CD Audio as well. To further improve the sound quality over the analog outputs, the DVD-1920 offers a "Pure Direct" button, which switches off all other outputs on the player as well as the display so nothing will be able to interfere with the analog signal.


Previous: Picture QualityNext: Supported Formats

Jump to Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8


Copyright © 2006 - BuzzyPedia.com