[Rob Babcock]

I just read this press release on the Denon site: http://www.dba-pr.com/clients/denon/releases/CES2004%20Receivers.htm.  Looks like a lot of whiz-bang HT reciever tech for the money.

This new model has digital parametric eq & auto room calibration, plus 3 x 100MHZ component inputs.  The big addition, though, is the Denon Link 3 high rez digital input.

Hmmm....enough component video inputs for my DVD player, Xbox & P2!

[bubba966]

Gee, sounds like Denon finally caught up to where Pioneer was almost 2 years ago...

Well Rob, looks like you can finally get yourself a nice receiver.  

[Rob Babcock]

The diff is the Denon might actually sound good!   Does have some cool features.  

Did the Pioneer receiver actually apply bass management to DVD-A or SACD via the internal input?  I don't think any Pioneer product has ever processed a DSD stream without converting it to PCM.  My Pioneer DV-45A DVD player didn't offer any kind of B/M whatsoever, but maybe the reciever does.

Again, I don't know a lot about the Pioneer recievers, but Denons ALPHA 24 is a nice step up over regular D/A conversion that you normally find in recievers.  Legato Link on the other hand, to be charitable, sounds like crap.

It's hard to say what advantage a digital hi res input will have.  I guess it depends on whether the reciever has better D/A's than the player.  My guess is they'll use the same processor, in which case the only advantage would be less IC's.  Of course, recievers tend to have more complete and flexible bass management than the players, although my DVD-2200 is pretty good in that regard.

Mostly I just posted the link because there's been a lot of talk/speculation about what the new line will be and when it'll come out.