Digital Drive: What you get for $30 in Walmart's DVD player by PeAK

I brought my father in law a $30 DVD player to complement his VCR based movie setup. He does not understand why VCR tapes are no longer offered at his local video rental store.
The model I got is the Diamond Vision DVDV807-03A

So what do you get:

Nice slender remote control
Capable of reading DVD's that would cause my Toshiba 3950 to freeze and lock up
Co-axial out so that you can hook up external DACs. This unit can downsample DVD audio to 2-channel PCM.
A touch noisier than the 3950

The first I notice is the electronic high pitched whine that would chase dog's away. I have limited hearing to about 12 KHz and that is saying a lot. Within the first 5 minutes of playing a CD, I was forced to hook up an external DAC just to remove the background ringing and buzzing. My ears felt as if they would bleed in 15 minutes time. Much better.

It reads JPEG images but has no "thumbnails" of the disks. It read the one MP3 encoded CD that I had. For $30, It should prove to be a interesting project to tackle to elminate the hash. For my father-in-law...hopefully the audio input and speakers on his TV will filter most of the has out with their limited response. It put an end to my plans to upgrade his TV playback via a Sonic Impact backend.

P.S. I returned an almost identical Digitec ALDV808 which could not downsample DVD move soundtracks to Redbook PCM. It had much less of the elctronic background hash that it was listenable. This unit should be fine for those that feed the digital output directly to the digital inputs of their Receivers.

PeAK