Page 1 of Doing it on the Cheap

As some of you may have seen I purchased the Targa DVDR from LIDL....

In hindsight this morning I may have been a bit harsh with my criticisms of it... as the main problem I have really have is the limitation of the equipment I have.

Basically my DVD/Audio/Home Theatre system is deliberately cheap! it`s been pulled together over the last 6 months and too be honest I am really happy with it as it stands.

What I have at the moment is:

Bench KH6777 DVD player (£30 from LIDL)
Denver DSS-200 (£80 from Netto a few months ago.... a DTS/5.1 Amp and speakers). - http://www.denver-electronics.com/pages/webside2.asp?articleGuid=7760&menuGuid=5387&subMenuguid=5392
This connects into my 4 year old Sharp 32" widescreen

As it stands I think the sound is excellent, the KH6777 isn`t the greatest player in the world though and I would like to replace it with a DVDR (I thought the LIDL one would do the job)

However the Denver system has no optical or coaxial connection...it depends on the DVD player to do the decosding for output as an analogue source to the amp. Most DVD plays don`t seem to have a built in decoder...and the LIDL DVDR I got only seems to decode Dolby Digital and not DTS through it`s 6 analogue outputs.

Maybe I need a standalone Dolby 5.1/DTS receiver/decoder that will accept a optical or coaxial input... I don`t want the speakers though and as long as it has 6 RCA outputs I would need it to include an Amp either.

Anyway I`d appreciate your views on how I should best change things around... or what standalone Dolby 5.1/DTS receiver/decoder I could go for......and in keeping with the rest of my kit...it must be cheap :)

Many thanks

DAN

Check Richer Sounds or ads in home cinema mags for the best deals.You should be able to get s discontinued model for a good price.Maybe just over £100
Its not surprising the £80 kit has no digital inputs-do you want blood?
But ,to be honest,a £30 dvd player,and a set of speakers probably worth £50 will waste a good amp.
Are you sure the speakers of the all in one have the correct connections to fit a separate amp?
If you had thought it through a bit more you could have got an all in one player/amp/speakers of superior quality and not paid much more than yu will end up paying after you buy the amp

I bought a Pioneer amp from Richer sounds earlier this year for under £100-It has all of your requirements on it. Downsides are it only has 3 rear AV inputs (plus one at the front), but that was plenty for me-also it`s not got enough `ooomph` to fill a big room, but it`s plenty for my listening pleasure-It`s also pretty decent with CD audio too, something my revious AV amp, despite having shedloads more power wasn`t.

One other `downside` was that it was black rather than the seemingly more popular silver, but that wasn`t an issue for me -though they did have the exact same model, but in silver finish for about 50 quid more! I know the price of these did go up as mine developed a fault after about 3 weeks, and they`d incresed the price then by about £20 I think, but it may well be back down now

Thanks for the suggestions guys...

Really all I need is somemeans to input a optical or coaxial DTS/Dolby Digital stream and then output this to my current amp...I have no idea if this kind of thing even exists but I`d imagine it to be fairly small... really just large enough to take the various connectors and the internal electronics to process the digital stream and split it into each separate channel...assuming I could do that it would be exactly what I needed I think.

.....hope that kinda makes sense???

Cheers

DAN

Don`t know if that does exist, but if it does, I could see it being more expensive than the cheaper end a/v amps-The one thing I should have added was that the Pioneer is extremely small by a/v amp standards-maybe a couple of inches high and about 13" wide.

Anyway, what would be the point in outputting a processed dolby/dts signal to a standard amp, it would lose the advantages of the processed sound and flatten it back to 2 speakers, surely?

Hi Emily...well it`s not really a standard Amp really....excuse my ignorance of this technology but as I understand it the feed into the amp is analogue however each feed remains separated through the amp within each channel and then output to it`s own speaker.

You can see the rear connections in this PDF manual http://www.denver-electronics.com/pages/webside2.asp?articleGuid=7760&menuGuid=5387&subMenuguid=5392

The problem is that it has not digtal to analogue converter itself and so expects the source of the audio to take care of this... in my case the Bench DVD player can handle both Dolby Digital and DTS, whereas my new Targa can not handle the later...it seems strange to me that Targa would add Dolby Digital analogue and not DTS.... maybe I am looking at it simplistically but I wonder if future firmware updates to the recorder would add this... be excellent if it did! :)

Thanks for your advice.