Denon DVD 2900

Author's product rating:   

Picture Playback	Excellent
Sound Level	Excellent
Range of Features	Excellent
Durability	Excellent
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Build Quality, Universal Player, Sound Quality, Picture Quality
Disadvantages:	Not Multi - region, not the best with CD playback

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

This unit will not only play DVDs, but CDs, DVD-Audio, SACD and MP3. It is equipped with DTS, Dolby Digital, SRS for surround decoding and has progressive scan. There is good connectivity, including SCART, coaxial, fibre optic and phono sockets.

Aesthetics are nothing special being yet another anonymous black box with big fat feet, but the unit is built like a battleship, weighing a tonne. It has a refreshingly uncluttered fascia - you only have the main transport controls, eject, power and two minor ancillary switches.

The display is informative, but rather confusing. This can be easily controlled though with various modes and brightness levels, or cancelled altogether. The remote is intuitive to use and contains all remaining functions. My main complaint is there is no illumination - only the main controls in the centre are luminous, but fortunately they are well spaced apart and distinctively shaped.

Turning the power on also selects the standby mode for if you need it to work with a system remote control. The tray mechanism is silky smooth and nicely damped. It further reminds of the exemplary build quality of the machine.

I use this player in a full size 5.1 THX home cinema with Lexicon / Bryston amplification, LCD projector and B & W speaker system. The DVD 2900 is about the best I have seen and heard in terms of DVD playback. You would need to venture into seriously high end territory to significantly improve on it, and it easily holds its own in the context of this system. The sound is extremely well controlled with punchy and deeply extended bass, crystal clear and natural sounding mid-range and treble. It is equally impressive with DVD Audio and SACD playback, the only drawback being that SACD will only playback the multi-channel through analogue outputs. This is something to do with piracy prevention apparently.

Picture quality is also hard to surpass, and I need a much better projector to really do this machine justice. Clarity is excellent, colours natural and very dynamic and detail very vivid.

My biggest gripe with the DVD 2900 is with CD playback. Anyone with a half decent system will be better off spending £3-400 on a stand alone CD player. After all the sonic fireworks with the other formats this is very hard to explain, but CDs just sounded flat and dull and not at all inspiring. It reminds me of the bad old days of early CD players and why it took me so long to buy one.

All in all, I cannot recommend this player enough, provided it is used mainly for AV purposes and not purely for Stereo hi-fi playback. It's a pity it cannot playback other region DVDs with the bargains there are to be had abroad, but this is a minor drawback for my requirements.