Best DVD for my System

I just bought a Marantz 9600 to go with my Fijitsu 50" Plasma/JM LAbs Alto Be/Chapter Audio Preface+/Hegel H4A.Sounds heavenly.

Why buy any now, wait for Blu Ray.

I just picked up a panasonic f87 5 disk changer. It has DVD audio, HDCD and dolby PLII all for $130. It has amazing sound and there is no sense spending more when HD DVD/BluRay are around the corner.

I don’t think Blu Ray is in my immediate future until all the movies and rental places switch. I need NetFlix, BlockBuster, and MovieShops to have Blu Ray. I do not buy many DVDs compared to my CDs.
To me the sound is more important than the video. I hear about all these low cost DVD players with excellent picture quality but I never hear about how good the sound quality is, so I am reluctant to purchase any of these lower priced DVD players. There may be some which are very good but I don’t know. I can say with the advent of Blu Ray, it probably kept me from looking at a Krell Standard DVD player. I guess there is a fine line with what I will spend and not. I can say the Denon DVD 9000 has very good sound for less than a $1000.00 dollars. I also can say some of the qualities I looked for were a sweet top end and very low deep authoritative bass. I thought at some point I will compare it to my Mark Levinson DAC and transport in my stereo system just so I have a side by side comparison.

I recently bought a new Sony DVP-NS9100ES for $849 to replace a Sony 9000ES, and find the audio quality at least as good on DVD (w/Cary pre/pro and Bryston amp). Video quality using 480i component output is noticeably better, and I've yet to try its HDMI output (waitin' on a cable). I'm very happy with the decision.

For me, the next feature to prompt a major HT component upgrade will not be on the video side; rather, it'll be the widespread presence of discrete 7.1 audio on HD DVD discs. Processor-generated 7.1 is much like "processed" cheese products - often no more enjoyable than the cheese we "cut" and sometimes less so, depending on the context and implementation. The DTS folks just released hardware to support discreet 7.1 for HD DVDs, but how just inclined recording engineers will be to mix soundtracks at that level of complexity and how satisfying an artistic standard results, en masse, from their work are huge uncertainties.

Just my two pennies...