CUSTOM INSTALLATION HOW-TO

Other video-oriented features include a host of fine-tuning adjustments suited to the critical videophile. For example, you can select among presets for CRT, plasma, and "professional" monitors to make sure the player's outputs are optimally matched with the visual characteristics of the type of video display you have. There are four video noise-reduction adjustments: for luminance, color, MPEG block noise, and MPEG "mosquito" noise. Finally, you can store all of your video settings - including those for esoteric adjustments like gamma and chroma delay - into one of four memory presets. This is a very handy feature, which can be used to save preferred settings for different types of program material or different monitors. For my tests, I used the CRT preset to match the monitor in our lab.

Hookup and setup were fairly straightforward. I was able to obtain unusually good speaker balances since the DV-47A has individual channel-level trim controls that can be adjusted in 0.5-dB steps - a welcome refinement on the too-coarse-for-perfection 1-dB steps provided with most other players and A/V receivers. (A half-decibel imbalance between, say, the front and surround channels can move finely calculated sound effects to the wrong positions.) The speaker-distance compensation - essential for the most precise imaging, especially among the front channels - operates only with multichannel DVD-Video and DVD-Audio programs but, unfortunately, not with multichannel SACDs.