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Toshiba HD DVD player as Transport

Anyone consider using one of the Toshiba HD DVD players as an inexpensive transport with an external DAC. My understanding is that it uses a RAM buffer which may go a long way towards minimizing jitter and timing issues and considering that you can buy these things for around $500 new it might make sense to do something like this and put most of your money into a high quality DAC. Any thoughts?
sw23

Showing 2 responses by pe3046

pe3046
120 posts
 
I have one, was going to use it for that but the first generation is rather loud because of the cpu cooling fan. When music is playing you cannot hear it but during quiet passages you can hear the fan. I have been trying to isolate mine or get a replacement heatsink to minimize it. Other then that, hd-dvd's and upconverted dvd's look amazing.
pe3046
120 posts
 
My experience differs, mine is very fast when opening and closing while using cd's about on par with a normal cd player. SD playback with the upconversion (which only works via the HDMI port and not the component because of the macrovision copy protection scheme) looks much better then the Phillips DVDSA963 I had before. HDDVD looks fantastic via HDMI or component (HD-DVD's as of yet do not have the ict flag set limiting resolution on the analog component outputs). My only complaint with mine is the noise of the fan.
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