Best player only for DVD-Audio

[KnyazHM]

Hi all,
I'm looking good DVD-Audio Player.
What best player only for DVD-Audio? The main thing - the quiet reading discs. I can listen to at night. May be Classe Audio CDP502?
Now I use universal UD9004

[JonMarsh]

Best for what? Lowest cost? Ease of use? Highest fidelity? Not trying to be snarky, but being an engineer, also involved in technical marketing, I prefer dealing in specifics... your request has insufficient data for meaningful answer relative to YOUR requirements.

For me, the answer to that question is based on fidelity, and is the same as what I use to play all music files- NAD M50, with external re-clocking . It won't rip DVD Audio, but that's easy to do in most cases with some off the shelf programs. The problem (from my perspective) with most DVD audio players is that they're modified DVD players, and attention to clocks and low jitter and a converter preferably NOT using sigma delta conversion isn't likely to be found. YMMV, depending on what your priorities are... The Classe should be quite good for a single box machine, but I don't know of any hardware reviews with measurements- something I trust more than subjective reviewers. It's not a bargain, by any means, at about $8500. That would pay for an M50, an M51, and a M52 combination, something which I think might offer both superior audible performance, and substantially more interesting functionality unless you really just prefer playing disks and keeping stacks of CDs around- and that's a valid choice, if you do. I've become really addicted to the functionality of a good network music player and local and network storage with remote control on iPad or iPod or iPhone, and the ability to quickly program complex playlists- you couldn't get me to go back to a disk player. Granted, at my age, I'm pretty old school, but here the advantages are clear to me in practice and every day use.

Again, YMMV...

[KnyazHM]

Best sound and quiet reading discs (reference drive)

[KnyazHM]

Found some DVD-Audio players who tried?

Classe CDP-502
Meridian 800 V4
Denon DVD-9000
Jolida JD700

[JonMarsh]

What you may unfortunately discover is that DVD-Audio players have not been very popular or successful in the market place- kind of mirrors the performance of DVD-Audio disks. Most of these were typically introduced around 2007-2008, and most are not currently available. What you might have more luck looking for, and which would give you a forward migration path, is a Blu-Ray player supporting BD-Audio and DVD-Audio, the latter a backwards compatible feature. Something like a Cambridge Audio 752 BD, or one of the current Oppo players. BD audio is not super popular at this time either, but there seems to be a steady stream of some new music disks being released in that format. With some effort, they can be ripped, too.