The best Universal player for under $5,000

I would spend $4000.00 for a nice used CD player, and the remaining $1000.00 for a new Universal player (Sony, Samsung, etc.) with the latest and greatest video features.

I'm very impressed with the used Esoteric DV-50 I picked up from this site for less than half of your budget.

Watch out for the DV137 -- it was released with SACD multichannel support but was an utter failure. The multichan SACD support has been removed. I've not heard about similar troubles with the DV139.

For under $5,000 you can get a used APL3910 which is a fantastic universal player. They are coming up on the used market now as the original owners are upgrading to the $20,000+ new APL NWO players. Check out the reviews by owners of this unit and visit the APL website to learn more.

Hlesser - could you expand on your comments? Hate to say it but I am about to buy a DV137 and need to know what the problems are. Thanks!

I auditioned a DV137 shortly after it was released last year. I was interested in a universal player that was SACD-capable. The multichannel SACD failed almost immediately and within days Arcam was saying that they were no longer supporting multichannel SACD on this player. I would have been steaming if I'd bought it only to find out that it wasn't all that "universal".

Here's a quote from Arcam:
"In order to optimise performance on DVD and CD playback we have decided to remove multi channel SACD playback from the DV137. We found distortion on a number of multi channel SACDs which requires further investigation but in the meantime we think it sensible to delete this feature. We hope to be able to reintroduce this later however it is impossible to give a cast iron promise on this. The DV137 can still play stereo SACDs." Regards, Andrew Dutton, Engineering Manager. ARCAM

and the link for details

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/archive/index.php/t-85627.html

That ended my interest in the unit.

Update
To be fair, there are recent threads on avforums.com that indicate that software upgrades to version 4+ may solve the SACD problem. There are, however, comments suggesting, as the British say, "dodgy" behavior on this unit.

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=447085&page=21

Good luck.

Used APL 3910.

Two coming new machines:
Marantz SA-11S2 & Esoteric X-05.

Or spend a bit more to get the Marantz SA-7S1.