First to B-Stock. From what I can tell, no difference whatsoever on the one I got. Cosmetically, no dents, dings, scratches. Even the connectors look new. The manual, oddly enough was worn. I would say I was disappointed in the manual as well. It is not very good. My old sony had a much more informative manual. They gloss over alot of the features and their description of the BM for DVD is horrible.
Overall pretty happy with the player. The video appears a little better, but I find video pretty hard to assess since I don't have a test disc. It does play a couple of DVD's my old sony would reject for some reason. Although the sony is a really old model.
I have listened a couple of ways. On the downstairs HT system in 2ch stereo/no sub 2 ch stereo/w sub and 5.1. So far, on the HT system my preference has been for 2ch/no sub. Not sure why, but I'm just not taken with the sub on for music. On some stuff, I'd like a little more thump, but the single sub just doesn't sound quite right. For movies, I don't notice much. The 5.1 just was not good for me. The mixes in 5.1 were inconsistent. (even on a single disk from one song to the next) I'll probably stear towards SACD stereo for now. More later