CD Players that transmit 24bit/96kHz

Kevin: Thanks for responding, although I'm still a little confused on one point. Do the DVD-A discs being released now, if they"re compatible with DVD-V (and will they say so on their label or packaging?), play with 24/96 resolution through both the DVD player's internal 24/96 dac and through its digital output (if capable of transmitting that data stream)? For example, you have the fine Muse transport/dac combination which I've heard playing the Classic discs. If you put a DVD-A disc into that transport, would it play, and would the resolution from the dac be at the 24/96 level? The Chesky work sounds very encouraging, by the way.

DVD-A and DVD-V are both playable on new DVD-A players since all these seem to be of the 'universal' type. DVD-A will not play on the large installed-base of DVD-V players. Moreover, it is unlikely that any of the major labels will permit the non-down-sampled digital output of their software.

If what you say is true, it may not be wise to get a separate 24/96 dac at this point, given the small inventory of 24/96 DADs and that the DVD-A discs won't be playable on anything other than a DVD-A player, which won't send out a 24/96 digital signal. Or have I missed something?

I have been told that the Pioneer Elite DV-05 DVD/CD transport will pass that signal rate. I own one, but have yet to experiment (this unit does very good job with AC3 and DTS sources).

In continuation to my previous post, I will attempt to clarify the matter further. The content provider will make the determination as to what content will be available (if any) in the VTS (the portion of the disc which can be read by a DVD-V player). It is possible that a disc might have a MLP encoded multi-channel material in the ATS. Since a project such as this might be strongly geared towards surround playback, they could choose to include Dolby Digital in the VTS, since that would be the only way to preserve surround compatibility on a DVD-V player. If the project were stereo, then it would not make any sense to put PCM in the ATS, simply include all the content in the VTS only, as there would be no motivation to be redundant. In the end, each label will determine the type of content. We may offer a listing on our web site giving information as to the type of content available should enough people express an interest. Kevin Halverson