I guess this is as good a way to introduce myself as any…

I have been rapidly redoing my home entertainment system lately. I have replaced the old display with a 42" Panasonic ED plasma, my old speaker system with a full compliment of Focal Chorus speakers (5.1) and most importantly the receiver was upgraded to a new Outlaw 1070.

I now find myself wanting to finish the upgrade by replacing the source components. Specifically, replace the DVD player and CD player and then add a DVR/HDD. I haven't really thought about my budget too much, but I suppose it should be in keeping with what I already have. Any suggestions for these components or places where I can do more investigation?

My priorities are movies, followed way back by music.

Thanks
Tim

Why not get a midline universal player to handle all your disc formats? Denon, Marantz, Yamaha etc. make decent units in the $500+ level. Don't know a great deal about DVR's so I won't touch that. You may want to wait out the HD format debate before dropping serious coin on a unit now if HT is your main thing.

Your ED display won't support higher than 480p resolution, so the upscaling players aren't going to be much benefit to you - you just need a good progressive scan player. Do you care about DVD-Audio and SACD? If not, then you can look at some quite good DVD players (which could double as CD transports) for just a couple hundred dollars. Maybe the Denon DVD-1720 or the Panasonic DVD-S77 (or even the Oppo, if your display has a DVI or HDMI input - it's main benefit is upscaling to HD resolutions, but you could set the DVI output to 480p for your plasma). Any of those would set you back around $200 or less.