How or will this affect the 950? Don't know, but I'm glad it's here.

How would one use this feature? I really don't understand it, can you explain to me how this would effect me and my buying habits

Has it been approved then? It won't affect the 950 (too late), but if it has been approved then it may free the Outlaws to start on some serious development of their DVD player and the 950's planned big brother.

As for what this is, there's been a big fight over DVD-Audio and SACD and copy protection. Currently, all DVD-A/SACD players must output an analog signal -- so you get 6 analog cables to deal with. The hope is that the powers that be can settle on a standard digital output format so the digital decoding of DVD-A & SACD can move to the receiver or pre/pro where all the other digital decoding is typically located. Firewire has been a likely candidate for the data connection, but I'd gotten the impression that it would be next year before anything was actually agreed on.

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Gonk

Gonk, here is the link for the Firewire announcement. Interestingly enough, they backdated the announcement to September.

http://www.highfidelityreview.com/

Now that is an interesting article. The only question remaining for the adoption of a standard DVD-Audio digital output is encryption that RIAA will accept, which the article seems to suggest hasn't been finalized. It also notes that SACD is still apparently going to remain analog-out only. Of course, most or all SACD material is still 2-channel I believe, but that means that you'll still be relying on the SACD player for bass management.

That may be great news for the future of the Outlaw DVD player -- digital output was one thing the Outlaws had said they really were serious about including. They were also talking about including bass management for the analog outputs, though, so those of us with older processors (1050's and 950's, for example) could still do DVD-Audio and SACD without needing an ICBM for bass management.

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Gonk

But how would the digital output benefit us since the 950 has no firewire compatibility.
Unless there is some upgrade, am I right
gonk?

Digital output won't do any good for the 950. Zilch. (Unless I'm missing something, but I'm pretty sure.) Upgrading the 950 later to support it would be a major deal -- aside from adding the port, you'd need to add the digital processing, which would very possibly mean an additional chip of some sort.

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Gonk

What baffles me is why there needed to be a different format for dvd-a. Why not use the existing format as is, other than to make every one upgrade there current player. And who was the body of people that said for dvd-a and sacd you must use analog out? The artists, recording studios? If they would have made the dvd-a play just like a regular dvd in any player none of us wouldn't even know what sacd is. It would have never even gotten off the ground with such a huge established base of players. So now when you go and buy a player that does both your supposed to use the analog output or if you like the digital output you have to use both. So you buy more interconnects. What a scam. I have listened to both and they both sound nice but so far I only have 2 dvd-a's.
We will see if cd's disappear or not.
m-mmeyer

The initial reason or rational for the analog outputs was for copyright protection. I find the argument a bit hollow, but that's their story and I guess they are sticking to it.

You can't use the traditional digital outputs (digital coax) since they aren't capable of carrying the increased data that DVD-A outputs.

We have analog-only DVD-A/SACD output for much the same reason we have region coding -- because the movie and music industries demanded it, not for any real technical reason...

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Gonk