13 going 30.

Nas,

I have lived with an Esoteric DV-50 and a Denon 5910CI for a couple years now. They are different players. I clearly prefer the Esoteric to the Denon, as evidenced by the Denon living in the bedroom system and the Esoteric more often in the main rig in the living room.

The Esoteric is more detailed and has much better bass control, especially on SACD's. The Esoteric offers more air and separation as well, and for the price of $2K (A DV-50s in on the gon now for this) they are a steal, I paid $4,500 for mine new and still think it was a buy at that!

You also get the benefit of much better build quality with the Esoteric, though it has a hard power button so you can't turn it on and of remotely.

Nas,

Did you run them through something that could decode the new codecs? I doubt so because if you did you would not have said that!

Nas,

I currently have four Blu-ray players and still have my Toshiba HD-XA2 HD DVD player in my rig, so I don't use the Esoteric for video at all, I use the Toshiba HD XA2, it's the best scaling DVD player I've ever had, better than the Denon too. I only use the DV-50s for CD's/SACD/DVD-A.

If you buy the DV-60, you will of course have a 1080p scaling player, which I suspect would do a very good job as well, but lets be real, it's almost 2009, Blu-ray players are selling for <$200 routinely and occasionally <$100, so I try to watch only NATIVE 1080p whenever possible!

Guys,

Not to add to this Sony/Esoteric debate, but I happen to have the original version of the Developmenti Blu-ray (DTS HD MA and Dolby TrueHD) and SACD hybrid discs, I played the Blu-ray in a Sony PS3 outputting LPCM to my pre/pro and used my Esoteric with the SACD and the Blu-ray was clearly better, now I know this is comparing two vastly different formats, but........