Recommendations for 5.1 upgrade

[Todd Anderson]

Finding a player that can play SACDs isn't easy these days. That's one reason people scrap for older OPPO Blu-ray and 4K players.

I agree with Mike. The Panasonic 820 is a great player and the onboard tone mapping is a nice feature. It takes a little bit of digging around to get the settings right, but once you do, you'll pretty much have a guaranteed good visual experience with any 4K disc you put in the player.

As for upscaling. I'd assume that any upscalling is done by the earliest component in your chain. As the signal gets passed along, it will appear as 4K, those those components will just pass it through.

 

[milleniumaire]

Thanks for the suggestions of the Panasonic 820, which is one of the players I've been looking at. I'm not sure I want to invest in an old Sony player just to support the SACD disks I have, but maybe in the future I'll change my mind.

It's interesting you both suggest letting the DVD player do the upscaling as Googling suggested using the TV was better, although it depends on the age and performance of the chips in the various devices. One reason for this was that when upscaling is performed earlier in the process, the HDMI cables need to be more capable to ensure the more detailed image is transferred. That shouldn't be an issue for me since I'll be using a new AudioQuest Ultra HDMI cable.

I guess it will be a case of testing the various devices/settings when I have everything connected up. Still a long way to go before I'm in that position.