The HD-A1 does apparently do a very good job with scaling regular DVD's, but most comparisons I've read have indicated that it's not actually better than the OPPO 971/981 players - some actually prefer the OPPO to the Toshiba for standard DVD's. Also, the HD-A2 does not have any multichannel analog output (5.1 or otherwise) - you have to go to the XA2 in the second generation players to get multichannel analog output.