Yamaha DVD-S1800BL 1080p Upconverting DVD SACD Player

Comment: I bought this to replace another Yamaha unit that only lasted 4 months
this unit started skipping and freezing in less than 1 month

Comment: I purchased this player to take the load off a constantly used Pioneer DVD recorder/player, on a recommendation from a friend, during the low price sale. He needed a new cd player and this had the high end da audio components he wanted, and the super reduced price, I figured it was worth the risk.
The machine itself is solid and well built and lives up to the clean sound quality he raved about, and the picture quality is excellent, too... my only gripe is it is picky with certain discs. Some play through, with no problem, but others cause a list of glitches from pixels to machine freezes. I expect that from Sony, for they are the finickeyist players out there,(and their quality has dropped tremendously) but not Yamaha- especially in the original price tag class. If I paid the original price, I would have returned it, but because when it isn't being picky, it's great and I couldn't touch another player with the sale price.
It used to be said that you get what you paid for, but now pretty much everything is overpriced and built questionably, so we don't know... I hope these companies read our reviews to understand where we are coming from, that would be nice.
So, blah, blah, blah... Original price 249.00- NO... under 100.00- YES.

Comment: As far as the quality and features go, its a great little box! I don't know if it's normal these days, but, it is much much slower to turn on and load up than my old dead Onkyo from about 10 years ago. Otherwise, I have no complaints.

Comment: I bought this a month ago, when there was a gold box deal. Had no idea what kind of quality it was going to be, but I was most pleasantly surprised. I needed an up converting player for my 55" plasma and all my prior players sound and video quality were just satisfactory at best. This player not only does an awesome job up-converting but the sound is outstanding too. The best part of the player is that you can set the dvd player to an all region player. Since it has a converting chip to play pal, and other formats to NTSC I can now play every region dvd on my wide screen now. If you can get this for under a hundred, it is way better then buying the cheap 50 dollar machines online that have a pal to ntsc converting chip too. The quality and make of this product is much much better.

Comment: This unit was purchased as a replacement for a single-disc Denon cd player, and is connected to a Natural Sound Yamaha stereo amp driving re-coned AR9 speakers. Well engineered classical piano cd's afford natural sound that to my ears is a reasonable approximation to live performance. Readers know that good single-disc cd players are not inexpensive. This discontinued Yamaha component affords fine audio performance at a modest price. A minor quibble is that the audio direct setting that by-passes the video circuitry also turns off the disc display. However the audio direct setting does not produce any differences in sound that this listener can detect.