[Sordel]

At the weekend I bought a Tesco Value DVD player: £17 odd (that's $35 to US forumites). It's got an SPDIF-PCM output option through a coaxial Digital-Out, and is - as I write - playing into my Mini stack. Other than that it has the "audiophile" feature of not having any sort of display.

So the question is: how bad could it be for the system sound to use a no-fi, super-budget source as a transport?

 

[Eagle_Driver]

If you're using such a cheap DVD player to output CD audio through the digital output, chances are that the player will resample 44.1kHz audio to 48kHz before it gets to the digital out (as the digital out in most cheap DVD players is only capable of outputting 48kHz or 96kHz audio). True, it won't sound as good as if the digital out natively passes through a 44.1kHz signal, but the resampling usually won't mangle the sound nearly as much as some computer soundcards would.