JVC SV-D723GD DVD-Audio/Progressive Player

JVC Swings for the Fences—and Connects

By Mike McGann
It’s been more than two years since I sat in a hotel suite in Osaka, Japan, and heard DVD-Audio for the first time. While the demo, put on by Panasonic parent Matsushita, was impressive, those of us in the room had a sense that it was a bit cooked. A quick look at a colleague’s sound pressure meter confirmed that the DVD-Audio samples had been played at about 3 dB louder, which can make it seem better in a quick demo. As usual, I decided to reserve judgement on DVD-Audio until I got my hands on a player, which I was assured would only be weeks, or certainly just a couple of months, away.

Time passed. Rival Super Audio CD shipped to rave reviews, including my own. We learned the horrible truth about pregnant chads. After about 100 weeks, finally a pair of DVD-Audio players showed up in my lab, JVC’s single-disc XV-D723GD and Kenwood’s five-disc DV-4070-B within a day of each other.

While there is some passing comparison between the two, the functionality of the units is somewhat different, as the Kenwood doesn’t have progressive video output and seems more targeted to the music aficionado. I address the Kenwood in detail on page 70 in this issue.

JVC, though, seems to have aimed for a home run right out of the box, offering a DVD player to cope with virtually any media, outputting high-resolution audio and video.

For those of you unclear about this whole DVD-Audio thing, here’s a quick primer: CDs are encoded at 16 bits and sampled at 44.1 kHz. For you non-tech-heads, that means CDs use moderate compression and only record sound up to about twice what humans can hear. DVDs generally use 24 bit, 48 kHz.

DVD-Audio uses 24 bit/96 kHz. You might argue that you can’t hear anything above 18,000 Hz, but two issues come into play: psychoacoustics and the comb filter effect.

Psychoacoustics involves how your brain perceives sound and how it interacts with the room you’re in. You might not be able to hear high frequencies, but they cause other things in your room and (gasp!) your body to vibrate in harmony, called secondary harmonics by some. Those slightly audible sounds impact how you perceive sound. The more fully sampled the frequency range, the more of these secondary harmonics are reproduced.

The other issue is comb filter effect, where the compression tends to cancel alternate higher frequencies because of low resolution. On a 16/44.1 recording, that effect begins at about 10 kHz, well within the realm of human hearing. On 24/48 recordings, the comb filter kicks in a bit higher, but again, within the range of human hearing. With 24/96, the comb filter effect occurs above 20 kHz, above the threshold of human hearing.

So is DVD-Audio better than CD, Dolby Digital or DTS? Oh, mai oui. Is it better than SACD? Since both use similar sampling rates, but very different compression schemes, the simple answer is: I dunno. I was blown away by 24/192 SACD, but only two-channel mixes of that audio format will fit on a 4.7GB disc. When five-channel 24/96 SACD shows up later this year, we’ll put it to the test, head-to-head.

Generally speaking, the audio from this unit is excellent. Senior Editor David Dritsas was amazed at the sound quality, relative to standard Dolby Digital or DTS, and it’s true. The lone downside, in my opinion, is that it takes pretty good hardware surrounding the XV-D723GD to get this kind of sound.

We chose to use an Onkyo TX-DSD989, which has a six-channel input. Forget about using a digital input becuase your receiver doesn’t decode DVD-Audio. While we may see such decoding in the future, it doesn’t exist now. Denon’s AVR-3801 (and AVR-3300) actually has eight-channel inputs, but we’re still talking $1,000. Plus, good speakers are going to be a must. In this case, we used about $4,000 worth of DynAudio and Monitor Audio speakers. While that may be overkill, I doubt you’d hear the difference as well from Dolby Digital through an economy speaker system.

Rest assured, the sound is great. I just wouldn’t rush out to the store and buy any DVD-Audio player unless you have the right gear, or plan to get the right gear in the very near future.

While I could go on all day about the audio quality of DVD-Audio and this unit (although I like the digital-to-analog converter in the Kenwood a hair better), this is also a high-performance video player. I immediately stacked it up against Toshiba’s SD-6200, what I consider to be the current state of the art in progressive output DVD players.

For the most part, the JVC held its own. Color saturation was slightly lower, and I noticed a few more artifacts in my favorite line-doubler challenge scene, the opening sequence from Star Trek: Insurrection. While the haystacks in the scene stayed pretty quiet, there was a little bit more jumping around on the JVC. Test patterns showed a sharp, clear 480 lines of resolution. Other than a few more motion artifacts, I could only complain about the remote, which is not back lit and features many, many tiny buttons. It does have a jog shuttle, though.

I suppose you could imagine, at a list price of $899 (and a street price as low as $599, amazingly), this unit is selling like hot cakes. While I’ll be reluctantly sending this unit back, I expect to buy one before mid year. I can’t think of any product on the market right now that is as good a value and does so many things well. While JVC has something of an undeserved reputation as a single hitter, the XV-D723GD is a 500-foot homerun. II

JVC XV-723GD DVD-Audio/Video Player

$899

•DVD-Audio decoding

•Dolby Digital decoding

•DTS decoding

•Progressive video output

•Component outputs

•S-Video outputs

•Coaxial digital audio output

•Optical digital output

•Jog shuttle remote

Pros

It does everything quite well and adds nice cosmetics with an amazing value.

Cons

You need a six-channel input on your receiver or pre/pro. It has an annoying remote and the same weak menu system as other JVC DVD players.

While I could go on all day about the audio quality of DVD-Audio and this unit, this is also a high-performance video player.

Click here for a Price Comparison from eCoustics.com.