DVD-Audio holds one immediate advantage: It comes out of the box as a 5.1-channel format, while SACD, as noted above, is still only 2-channel. Sony and Philips say they will offer a multichannel version, but they haven't so far. Walker said the hardware for that iteration of the format isn't available yet, so the DV-AX10 can play only 2-channel SACD.

Reviewing the DVD-Audio portion of the player isn't easy—there are no real DVD-A discs on the market. Pioneer sent me several sampler discs, and I still had one provided by Panasonic, but it's hard to seriously review a product without recordings and music you're familiar and comfortable with.

Nonetheless, once again I found that DVD-A offered a much cleaner, richer signal. The harsh upper-midrange edge I hear on some CDs was largely absent, if not wholly eliminated. But there was an openness to the SACD selections, a feeling that I was actually in the room with the musicians, that was not as evident with the DVD-A samplers.

Two problems might explain this. First, mixing 5.1-channel music is a tricky business. There's the temptation to wrap the musicians around the listener, even though no one ever listens to music sitting in the middle of the band. Instead, the rear channels ought to be used for room ambience. But on all of the sampler discs, the music was all around me, a disconcerting experience that made it harder to make a clear judgment.

Another problem is that DVD-Audio comes in several flavors. The highest-quality discs are 24-bit/192kHz. I had a few selections recorded in that format, but because there is no material available that was recorded at both 96kHz and 192kHz sampling rates, I could make no clear distinction between the various possible resolutions.

Perhaps I've spent too much space on the audio; this is, after all, a home-theater magazine. But these are new formats, and many home-theater enthusiasts, including this one, began life as audiophiles.

My reference standard DVD player is Sony's DVP-S7000, with which I have been nothing but pleased these last few years. But it took no golden eye to see the improvements in picture quality with the Pioneer. I used it first with my wonderful reference standard, Sony's VPH-G90u projector, and a Faroudja VP 401 line quadrupler. Initially, however, I set the Faroudja aside and used the DV-AX10 straight into the G90, from its interlaced component outputs, with no video processing at all. Right away, an A/B test using familiar sequences showed the Pioneer to have much richer colors and sharper edges than the DVP-S7000. The effect was to make images more vibrant and realistic—the best I have ever seen from a DVD player.

Next I brought the Faroudja back into the loop. This should have lessened the differences between the two players, and to a degree it did. For this comparison, I gave the Sony player the advantage, feeding it into the Faroudja through the component input, and the Pioneer through the S-video input. The Faroudja, of course, manipulates the picture in its own ways. Still, in theory, the better the signal going in, the better the picture coming out. In fact, the Pioneer still offered better color saturation and sharpness, though the difference was reduced.

The Faroudja VP401 won't accept a 480-progressive input, so I couldn't use the Pioneer's progressive output with it. Fed directly to the projector, the progressive-scan image was largely free of lines. I would like to try it with one of Faroudja's later processors, like the 5000 model, which accepts a progressive-scan input. Reducing the processing by one step should improve the picture.

As others have written in this magazine, progressive-scan players would seem to be of limited utility: Any display you're likely to have that would accept a progressive-scan image is already likely to have a line multiplier built in or attached. To test that, I tried the Pioneer with a Hitachi 36DX88B 36-inch direct-view HDTV I keep on hand. Like almost every HDTV, the Hitachi has a built-in line doubler, though as one of the first-generation models it is relatively noisy. A DVD played on the Hitachi through the Pioneer was quite a bit cleaner, though it has to be remembered that the Hitachi set costs $3000—at least $2000 less than the DV-AX10.

I've never used a Pioneer DV-09, but Pioneer says the DV-AX10 improves on its picture. I didn't have a DV-09 to test that, but TJN uses it as his reference standard. He used the DV-AX10 for a few days and reported that, while its picture was excellent, it did not appear to be markedly better than the DV-09's. [See my comments in the sidebar.—TJN]

As a conventional CD player, using its analog outputs, the DV-AX10 was a more than competent performer. It did color the music a bit, but not in unpleasant ways. The bass was full and tight, the midrange solid and no harsher than CDs themselves usually are. But the high end, while clean, sounded sweeter than I'm used to from my reference, the Rega Planet player—not unpleasantly so, just different. Maybe the Pioneer was more accurate. Who knows?

Conclusions
It's not often a product inspires an attack of instant avarice, but the Pioneer DV-AX10 did. It's the future and the past—a player that does everything technology allows today. The only things I can see on the horizon that might overtake it are recordable and high-definition DVD. The latter is probably years away; the former should be on the market now. But that would be a different product indeed.

If you want the best, and a product that is as close to future-proof as anything can be in today's digital world, the DV-AX10 is just the thing. I warmly recommend this player. I was very unhappy to have to send it back.