Philips DVD-855AT (1999)
Philips's top-of-the-line DVD deck from the format's awkward adolescence - a $599 player whose video performance outclassed its own disc-reading manners.
Overview
The DVD-855AT arrived in 1999 as Philips's newest flagship DVD player. It carried 5.1-channel Dolby Digital decoding onboard, so six discrete analog RCA outputs could feed a surround system directly with no outboard processor. For everyone else there were coaxial and Toslink digital outputs passing PCM, DTS, Dolby Digital, and MPEG bit streams, plus component, S-video, and composite video jacks. The front-panel headphone jack and every rear-panel RCA pin jack were gold-plated. Small thing, but it tells you where this player sat in the lineup.
The conversion hardware was the headline. Philips claimed 10-bit video DACs, a two-bit margin over the 8-bit video data actually encoded on DVD. The audio side ran 96-kHz/24-bit D/A conversion. Component video outputs enabled horizontal resolution as great as 540 lines on a capable display. A bit-rate display, a three-level digital zoom that worked in still-frame, slow motion, and normal playback, and bidirectional three-speed slow and fast motion rounded out the feature set. The deck also handled multi-angle and subtitle displays, aspect-ratio selection, and parental control. It was compact: 17 inches wide, 3¼ inches tall, 12 inches deep, and just 8 pounds (3.6 kg). Price at launch was $599.
Then there's the Spatializer circuit, which the menu labels "3D (N-2-2)." It creates an expanded soundstage when you're running only two speakers, a stereo or Dolby Surround setup rather than a full 5.1 array.
The remote is where the ergonomics get interesting, and not in a good way. It's longer than typical, and while it sits easily in one hand, you'll need the other to push the buttons. It also chirps like a lost bird when you power the player on from the front panel, and it keeps chirping until you strike a key. The same alarm sounds if you touch the front-panel power button while the player is running. That's useful for locating a misplaced remote and irritating if you don't want it. "Remote Confirmation" in the Operation menu lets you kill the beep acknowledgment entirely. The remote also ships preprogrammed with codes to control muting and volume on a reasonable number of amplifiers and receivers and to change channels on many TVs. It replicates all the basic transport functions except Pause, which is replaced by a backlit "Jog/Pause" button that activates a jog dial and shuttle ring. The ring handles slow or fast motion in either direction depending on how far you twist it. The jog dial advances or reverses frame-by-frame.
You will need that remote, because the chassis itself is spartan: only rudimentary transport controls (Pause, Play, Stop, Next, Prev), a tray open/close pad, a Repeat button, a headphone level control, and the power switch.
Audio (April 1999, p.7) put the DVD-855AT through Edward J. Foster's measurement bench and came away impressed by the video. Luminance-channel response was almost perfectly flat to 5.5 MHz — the highest test frequency on the Lucasfilm THX DVD — and chroma response was down less than 10 dB at 2.75 MHz, again the disc's ceiling. Foster noted the only luminance irregularities traced to ripple from the video DAC's reconstruction filter, with no rolloff in the electronics and no measurable chroma-luma time displacement. His verdict: the player should deliver sharp, snappy pictures on any good monitor calibrated to accept its slightly higher-than-standard signal level — all video signals ran about 1 to 1.2 dB hot, correctable at the display. The zoom function, he added, worked surprisingly well, and he couldn't recall seeing sharper test patterns from any DVD player.
The built-in Dolby Digital decoder measured just as cleanly. Audio (April 1999, p.51) reported the five main channels balanced within ±0.03 dB in output and within a total spread of ±0.2 dB in response. The LFE channel was essentially flat to 120 Hz, where the THX test disc's sweep quits. There was some filter ripple and a slight treble droop in the main channels, tied to the D/A converters.
The disc transport, though, had manners problems. The same Audio review (April 1999, p.56) found the player refused to recognize CD-Rs outright. There was no "No Disc" message, just an endless "Load" cycle until the reviewer gave up and hit Eject. It also balked at two commercial CDs on first insertion (one Philips, one Deutsche Grammophon), behaving as if no disc were present until the tray was opened and closed. The reviewer suspected a fluke with his sample rather than a design flaw. Philips claimed a dual-laser pickup, which makes the CD-R refusal all the more puzzling.
One limitation: the DVD-855AT will not play the DVD-Audio discs proposed by the DVD Forum. Neither would any other DVD player on the market at the time. It means the deck's audio ceiling is DVD-Video's 96-kHz/24-bit stereo and Dolby Digital. It does play the audio data available on some Chesky and Classic Records DVD-Video discs.
The on-screen menu system is unusually deep for the era, and the multilingual, multivolume owner's manual is, by the reviewer's own account, far more complete and better written than most. The audio menu offers "Analog 6CH" for discrete surround via analog connections, "Analog 2CH" for stereo or Dolby Surround to a TV or Pro Logic system, and "PCM" to pass a two-channel PCM digital signal to an outboard DAC or digital recorder. Choose Analog 6CH and further submenus let you redirect bass from center and surround channels to a subwoofer (or to the front left and right if you're running without one), toggle center and surround speakers on or off, and adjust center and surround delays in 1-millisecond increments. Center and surround are treated as a pair for bass redirection, so you can't set center to Large and surrounds to Small. That's a real limitation if your speaker setup is mismatched. There's also a test-signal sequence for setting channel balance.
The rest of the audio menu is a set of toggles: Dynamic Range Control (Dolby Digital only, compresses dynamics for late-night listening), Karaoke Vocal (Dolby Digital karaoke discs only), Extended Audio Features (spoken descriptions of on-screen action for the visually impaired), and the Spatializer 3D circuit. The Display menu handles on-screen displays, Extended Subtitle Features, a screen saver, and a background-color choice between gray and blue. The Operation menu covers Parental Lock (eight levels, four-digit code), Remote Confirmation, Title Stop, PBC for Video CD playback control, and a still-picture choice between "Auto" (shake-free freeze-frame) and "Frame" (better resolution on pictures that would have been steady anyway).
For collectors, the DVD-855AT is a flagship from the year DVD was still fighting for shelf space. Its strengths are the video DACs, the decoder balance, and the gold-plated jacks. Its weaknesses are the CD-R refusal, the occasional disc-recognition failure, the chirping remote, and no DVD-Audio. These decks trade as period curiosities more than as daily drivers. Anyone buying one should plan on a universal remote, since the original is long and awkward and its preprogrammed codes are decades out of date, and should test CD-R playback before handing over money. The laser assemblies are the usual question mark on any 25-year-old optical player, and there's no parts pipeline to speak of.
What the deck does well, it does with a certain Philips confidence. The video measurements were genuinely excellent for 1999, the decoder was balanced to a fault, and the menu system was more thoughtful than most. It's the kind of player that reminds you Philips was in the room when DVD was invented — and that being in the room doesn't always mean getting the transport right.
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