Sony DVP-S7700 DVD Player
Only half a player!
There are many similar purchasers of the Sony S7700 that are extremely disappointed in the sound quality of this unit and have had another piece of equipment previously who's audio was far superior and cost less money.   For example, my previous player was a Sony S-530D which had within 6 months  lip-sync problems, an audio that would periodically cutout, and a picture  that froze and broke-up into pixels (similar to satellite broadcast  problems), however, its' audio was excellent when it worked.  Now that I  have moved to the top-of-the-line in Sony DVD players, I am again  disappointed and am of the opinion that they can not make a quality product  that is complete. Thus far, I have contacted Sony to see if they are  willing to do anything about the situation and to determine if the reported  down-sampling of the digital output from 97 MHz to 48 MHz is the cause for  the poor sound quality or, if not, whether they will do something about  this issue.  At this point I am not very optimistic about Sony  satisfactorily addressing this issue and offering a fix via a service  center.  Unfortunately, out of all the buyers who have this same issue and  want good sound quality, none have posted results of pursuing the  down-sampling fix by MSB to address this issue-does it work or is it  something else.  This unit was supposedly designed to be a top quality  audio player since it has dual discrete pickups with separate lasers for CD  and DVD at the optimal frequencies, however, the audio output is dismal at  best for both.  If I were the manufacturer of this product, I would be so  embarrassed about my top-of-the-line product, I would move heaven and earth  to rectify this issue, we can only assume that they are either incapable or  don't care.