I told BossoBass I'd write this up.

Like many people, I bought this unit because I wanted a universal multichannel audio player for DVD-A and SACD. The video is secondary to me. There's a thread going on over at AVS that speaks of bass management issues. I thought I understood bass management but my experiments over the last few days have left me scratching my head.

I will gladly say that the 2900 is performing very well with my 950, 755 and M&K speaker setup. I sat down last night and listened to Dark Side of the Moon in multichannel from beginning to end. I'm a casual Floyd fan so the new mix does not offend any hardcore traditionalist sensitivities . It is a great experience hearing this recording in high rez format.

I also played several DVD-As that I have and the sound is improved in terms of clarity and fullness over the JVC player I had been using. I have two AIX Records releases, Peter D'Agostino and Chopin Four Ballades (sp?), and these sound fantastic. D'Agostino is acoustic guitar with percussion and the dynamic range is outstanding. The recording truly catches the musical dynamics of the musicians and my system is reproducing them so well now that it makes me want to practice. The piano recording is also well done and sounds great with this player. I'm looking forward to getting the "Celebrating the Music of Weather Report" SACD that BossoBass has recommended.

I'm still trying to figure out the bass management thing. It's not just the 2900 but also how it interacts with the 950. I get plenty of bass, sometimes too much. I just don't know what's correct. A lot of it is because the recordings are all mixed differently. For example, "Dreams" on Fleetwood Mac, Rumors DVD-A has oodles of bass. With the Denon in the system and "calibrated", it's too much bass. I compensate by turning down the sub if the recording is too hot.

The setup that works best for me is to have the BM in the Denon off and the 950's analog bass management switch on. When calibrating the Denon speaker level output, I turn the sub off when measuring and adjusting the five main speakers. This is probably wrong but it compensates for the 950's redirect of bass to the sub from the other channels. Despite the calibration difficulty, the playback response is very good and maybe a little "bass heavy". I'm still tinkering.

One of the things that has me scratching my head is the subwoofer on/off setting in the Denon. Using the Avia calibration disc, I'm trying to determine if the unit reacts properly to the LFE signal. I want to know if I set the sub setting to "no" that the LFE is redirected to the Mains if they are set to large. To my surprise, the answer appears to be "no". With the Denon, I set the speakers to Large and the Sub to no and feed it through the 6 channel direct input on the 950. There is an LFE-only frequency sweep on the Avia disc that I played and I got no sound at all. I was bummed because I'll be setting up stereo subs as soon as my second one arrives and without that functionality in the Denon, they may be setup as dual mono.

Ignorance is bliss though because when I sit back and just listen, the system with the Denon sounds great and it's a real pleasure. I'm very curious about what's going on with the BM but it isn't causing me any listening distress. The unit is a keeper for me because it plays both audio formats very well and is a decent DVD-V player. It also has me thinking that I have to study up on BM a little more. I love research.

[This message has been edited by DollarBill (edited May 09, 2003).]