Digital Trends

Pioneer DV-563A July 2nd, 2004 | by Tim Price

Design and Features

The Pioneer DV-563A comes in your standard 17” home theater size unit, and can easily be incorporated into an already existing system. It features a silver casing complete with matching remote control.

Rear outputs feature the standard digital and analog audio connectors as well as S-Video, component and composite video out. The outputs are easy to read and hook up.

One of the few downfalls of the Pioneer DV-563A is the included remote control. It is not universal and the buttons can be hard to read without proper lighting. It is small in size, however, and simple one handed operation is possible once you get accustomed to the button placement.

For video, the DV-563A features a 10-bit/54MHz Video D-A converter and PureCinema 2:3 Progressive Scan. This enables the player to double the amount of information displayed and then double it again horizontally and vertically to eliminate artifacts created from a film to analog (home video) source. This is a big step up from their previous PureCinema and PureCinema II converters.

On the audio side, it offers Virtual Dolby Digital with SRS TruSurround and digital coaxial and optical outputs for Dolby Digital and DTS surround. A high-end 192kHz/24-bit D-A converter ensures superb musical performance. What makes this player unique from other players in its price range are the 5.1 channel audio outputs that are used for DVD-AUDIO and SACD playback.

Flexibility is one of the major selling points of the DV-563A. This player can handle almost any format out there, and unlike some players that say they can read CDR and CDRW+,- and then have read problems with certain disks or setups, we had no issues at all with this unit. In our testing, we never had a disk that was properly burned not work on this player, something that

can't be said for the majority of multi-format players we have tested.