Denon A1 comes back home… again!

A day late, my Denon A1 came back to me. Without delay, I hooked it up and it worked like a charm. According to the Denon “engineer” they are unable to fix the Chroma upsampling as of yet. It seems to be a problem with the decoder chip, rather than the firmware.

In any case, the engineer demonstrated the new firmware and transport:

• (disp) ESS C01
• (menu) DRV 6193-4
• (menu) ESS 6578
• (menu) PANEL 6091-2

The ESS C01 seems to indicate a completely new decoder board.

This evening, a “technical bloke” called Mr. Shigeyama from Denon’s central service centre contacted me and asked for the photos of the chroma problem. He’d at first thought that the problem was an antialiasing filter problem. However, he changed his mind on seeing the closeups.

When I asked the “technical bloke” why he didn’t have any photos himself, he told me that they’d only tested the DVD-A1 on a 29″ Widescreen TV, and at that size, no visual defects were found!

Now, why would anybody use a ¥360,000 (£1,800) player with a ¥50,000 (£250) TV, let alone test one?

Anyway, he stated that Denon will be looking into the source of the visual defects over the next one or two months and that they would get back to me if they had any more news.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy my fully updated player.

Me	Denon
63 days	89 days
41%	59%