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The new Elite DV-47A, available in February for $1200, is a key product from Pioneer Electronics, based on the company's DV-747 player only available outside the US market. Unlike Pioneer's previous universal player, the $3000 AX10 (which only performs 2-channel SACD decoding), the DV-47A offers full six-channel SACD output using a Sony native DSD decoder chip (no conversion to PCM), in addition to both DVD-A and standard DVD-video playback.

Player-based bass management is available for both formats. The unit is progressive scan, using Pioneer's improved Pure Cinema II deinterlacing. A sample SACD took only 8 seconds to load (compared to up to 40 seconds for the only current competing product), and standard DVD was very fast. MPEG decoding has reportedly been improved, but the absence of technical personnel on Press Day made it impossible to determine if the chroma upsampling artifacts problem affecting many DVD players (including previous Pioneer models) have been resolved. Stay tuned for more info.

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