If you select the stereo button, the remaining buttons will be grayed out and made inactive. In this mode, the CDP-300 acts as a versatile two channel disc player that can handle many differing disc formats. In a stereo configuration, many of the decisions you need to make in a multichannel system no longer apply.
By selecting the multichannel button, you will be able to engage the bass management system within the CDP-300.
Having bass management in your DVD player is especially valuable when playing DVD-Audio discs using the analog outputs. DVD-Audio discs usually contain five full-range channels plus a dedicated LFE (Low Frequency Effects) channel. By telling the CDP-300 which of your speakers is less than full range, it can redirect the bass that would otherwise be sent to those smaller speakers to those that will be able to reproduce it. This results in both improved performance and better reliability, since you are not asking speakers to do anything other than what they were designed to do.
Modern video displays make extensive use of video processing (as does the CDP-300 itself). This circuitry converts standard definition video (480i or 576i, depending on your local broadcast standard) to a format that is compatible with modern fixed matrix displays such as LCD, DLP or plasmas.
However, this conversion process takes some small amount of time, causing a “lip sync” problem between the audio (which has not been delayed appreciably) and the video (which has been delayed for processing). While some people are more sensitive to this problem than others, anyone who perceives a consistent lag between the audio and video will find it quite annoying.
The audio delay function of the CDP-300 addresses this by delaying the audio by anywhere by up to 200 milliseconds. This range of adjustment should be adequate to handle any video processing delay you might find in your system.
Note that the best use of this delay is to compensate for any delay introduced by the CDP-300’s own video processing (assuming you are one of the ones who are sensitive to this sort of thing). The CDP-300 can only delay audio coming from itself, and has no control over (for example) broadcast television you may be watching. If your television introduces enough video processing delay to be noticeable, you would be better off using the audio delay feature of your A/V preamplifier/processor (assuming it has this capability—which Classé processors do have.)
