The A20 really feels like a consumer electronic device; very different than the A1. The remote is an improvement over the A1 as well, but we still wish it was back-lit like the XA1/XA2's. We're not sure why they even bothered to include composite cables, what is the point of composite cable on a HD movie player anyway? Lucky for us we had all the cables we needed to get things connected.

After we got it connected, we were impressed that the component outputs defaulted to 1080i, this only makes sense considering almost every HDTV with component inputs supports 1080i. Our test TV is getting long in the tooth and doesn't have HDMI, so we used component for all of our tests.

We used toslink for audio, since we don't have one of those new Onkyo receivers with HDMI 1.3 yet. One thing that is missing on the A2 and A20 is a coax digital output and discrete analog outputs. Considering there are so many receivers without HDMI, not having discrete analog outputs makes all that great codec support useless. The conversion process for toslink devices works well, and considering we weren't able to enjoy the next-gen audio formats; the audio sounded great.

The only adjustments that we needed to make during setup, was to enable DHCP, and download the latest 1.5 firmware update. It's great when manufacturers continue to try to improve the hardware even after it's shipped, but it does get in the way of our fun right out of the box. The update took a very long time -- we considered rebooting -- but instead heeded their warning and waited it out.