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Re: [ARSCLIST] Longevity
Well, good luck with it Rod. The Toshiba has performed like a champ for 2 years here. Sounds like
those two reviewers (out of how many units sold? -- people never take the time to say nice things,
which is why I rarely trust "user opinions" on things) got bad units, maybe gray goods or the like.
I have an older (5+ years) Toshiba DVD/CD player that gets used daily at work and has never had
trouble.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rod Stephens" <savecal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, July 03, 2006 3:56 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Longevity
Hi All,
Thanks to Phillip and Tom for input on the units below. I've done some follow up research on
Epinions and came up with these evaluations on both units.
Tom Fine wrote:
Hi Rod:
Toshiba used to make an incredible little unit. I think they got out of the SACD business. The
Toshiba I have, model #SD-4960, plays SACD quite well (not quite as well as my Marantz player,
but this thing cost less than 1/3 as much), DVD's very well and audio CD surprisingly well (ie
they didn't cheap out on the D-A converter or the analog stage after it). I bought it after
reading a very good review somewhere. I think it cost $120 on sale, perhaps on sale because it
was being phased out.
Tom, I'm sure that this was a good unit for you, but it seems to have laid an egg for some who
have purchased it more recently:
http://www.epinions.com/pr-Toshiba_SD-4960_DVD/display_~full_specs
I appreciated your general comments below on SACDs in general, but it looks like the Panasonic
that Phillip recommended seems to currently win out on both cost an user appreciation:
http://www.epinions.com/pr-Pioneer_Pioneer_DV-578A-S_Silver_Single_Disc_DVD_Player_Single-disc_DVD_Players_DVD/display_~reviews
However, I'm still checking out the competition.
Thanks again to both of you for your input.
Rod Stephens
I am not 100% on this, but the impression I got is that SACD laid an egg in the mass market and
thus lower-end multi-format players are not including in this latest year or last year's models.
My own opinion is that some SACD discs sound really wonderful, and some multi-channel mixes are
worthwhile but overall it's not worth a lot of extra expense (particularly since it's a
submerging format) and there wouldn't even have been a window of opportunity if there were better
CD mastering and remastering engineers out there. And, since the same guys also do SACD, the same
percentage of SACD releases are really excellent (ie small percentage).
One man's opinion, etc.
-- Tom Fine
<snip>