It seems so.

Something else worth trying - I have noticed that being a vocal HD DVD apologist has a beneficial effect on the performance of your own player.

Still having trouble keeping these units in stock at Best Buy. They still sell out the same day we get them in. For the most part, we have had plenty of people very happy with their purchase. We have only had one return that I know of, and that was someone who spent his rent money on the player and his wife made him take it back. heh

yeah, they were out at my store and they told me most of the incoming stock was reserved already through June, so I had to go elsewhere.

they were really great about the return though. I didn't even have the box anymore.

How many more months before we find out what beneficial effect being a Blu-Ray apologist has?

We already have. None.

Bestbuy.com and circuitcity.com apparently both have the players in stock on the website to be ordered online.

Thanks! Just ordered one.

BB or CC? Did you use RZ? How long did they say for delivery?

Best Buy, but I'm actually picking one up (at the West Hollywood store here in LA). No Reward Zone....

A little preface:

Leading up to the release of the HD players, I was a moderately open-minded supporter of Blu-Ray. It seemed wholly logical to support the format with a greater capacity and more comprehensive studio support. I just assumed that BD would win. They had T2 as a launch title, which just happened to be the first title I ever bought on Laserdisc as well - it was fate! Alas, reality has a funny way of messing with expectations.

My decision to buy the Toshiba occurred approximately 3 minutes after playing with a Samsung BD setup showing XXX at Best Buy in Westbury, NY. The picture had severe macroblocking and was terribly soft. Compared with the Phantom of the Opera disc I'd seen several months earlier, XXX was simply unacceptable.

So began my search for an A1. All Best Buys on Long Island were sold out. Buy.com had a good deal, and they said they were in stock, but I got a backorder notice after ordering. I finally bit the bullet and ordered from Amazon. The player arrived today.

The setup:

First, a little background on my equipment:

- Panasonic 50PX50U plasma
- Adcom GTP-750 Preamp w/ 7000 Amp

I plugged the HD-A1 into the HDMI port of the television, and I had to use the Optical connection on the pre-amp. Sadly, this was the last pre-amp Adcom made before they started including 5.1 analog connections on all their equipment. I suppose an audio upgrade is in my future

Sadly, after powering on my unit, my TV began emitting a high-pitched squeal. FWIW, my unit has a build date of June 2006 and came boxed with firmware 1.3. From reading avs, I knew I had the high frequency bug, and had to upgrade to firmware 1.4 before playing with my new toy (damn!)

Downloading the firmware was a huge pain in the ass. Toshiba foolishly has its player try to resolve DNS instead of connecting directly to an IP address, only adding to the complication of hooking the unit up to my router. After about 30 minutes of fiddling with settings, (made infinitely more annoying by the A1's extremely slow boot time and its periodic urges to search for a disc after pressing OK in the setup menu), I connected to the site and downloaded the firmware. The process took about 45 minuted and concluded flawlessly.

I decided to try Doom as my first title, since I figured I'd be able to judge motion, sound, and color very quickly with this title. As soon as the Universal logo came on, I almost lost it. The picture was outstanding.

What I didn't expect, though, was that I would be more impressed by the audio than the video. The surround separation was unbelievable, with effects in the rears coming through crystal clear and dialogue punching right through the center. Right at the beginning, there is a period of a few seconds during which you hear a propeller taper off in the left surround speaker. The quality of this effect mixed in with everything else that was going on absolutely blew me away, and I was only listening to a DTS downmix of the stream!

I don't want to sell the picture short by talking so much about the audio. The colors popped off the screen, the sharpness of detail was just outstanding, and I didn't detect any blocking. I am very, very impressed with the sampling of video I've seen so far.

Sadly, since it took so damn long to set everything up, I haven't had enough time to play around with the unit, although I suppose I have the rest of the summer for that.

Thanks to all who recommended the A1 - it is clearly an excellent unit.

congrats!

yeah...the sound was a HUGE surprise. I knew it was going to be good but I had no idea that it would make even my older discs sound incredible. I've had friends come over who were equally as impressed with the sound. Glad to know I'm not the only one talking about it.

I'm a little unclear as to how the audio is working. Dolby Digital Plus is being converted to DTS? I read a bit about it on AVS but no single post made it completely clear.

Don't go that route. Go analog. Absolutely amazing.

Analog using what connectors? Not RCA, I hope (sorry if I seem dim on this, I've only ever used optical or coax for sound).

Yep. RCA. That's what everyone is using.

So just go to Radio Shack and buy five separate single RCA connectors?

You could always get 2 pairs and a single :P

Wacka wacka. Yes, thank you. I just thought that for such high quality audio, I'd be trying to look for something other than regular old RCA connectors. It feels so backwards to me.

There is a thread about the audio hook-up that, I believe, i started the weekend I got mine. I thought the same thing but trust me when I say that you won't look back.

You'll need six. You're forgetting the .1 channel.

Ideally, you'll want them to all be 75 ohm RCA cables, which means the "video" type but not the "audio" type (which are usually only 50 ohms). In practice, unless you have long cable runs it probably won't make much difference. If you want to be safe, buy two sets of component video cables and use those.

Well, if you don't want to feel like that you can buy 3 pair of these audio interconnects:

3.28 ft. Blue Truth Audio Cables

They're only $89.95 per pair.

And off to get some old RCA cables I go!

Actually, since it is analog audio, the 50 ohm audio cables are more appropriate. Not sure why you'd say you don't want audio cables for audio.

Will component cables get me better audio fidelity?

Any should be fine. Analog audio is very easy to transmit, esp at line level.