Digital Woes (Elite DV-45A ground loop and bad sound)

[pjpoes]

I used to own a slightly modified carver cd player that I had going out ot a slightly modified AA DDE V3.0 and a basic AA DTI. The sound was not bad, I always liked it, finding it very musical and listenable, but lacking in resolution and detail. Around a year ago my Sony DVD player broke and my Carver stopped working, the entire control cuircit began malfunctioning in a strange way. I couldnt find replacement parts for what seemed to be causing the problems, so I tossed the cd player and the Sony. I then purchased a Pioneer Elite DV-45A Universal player. I thought this might be my solution, I could upgrade the output stage maybe, see hot it works. Well its been a piece of crap since I bought it, it sounds terrible on its own, it causes a buzzing sound (Ground loop) when I have it connected through any sort of standard electrical connection, such as RCA or Coaxial digital connections. The only way to stop the hum is to break the loop using a toslink connection to my old dac. I dont like toslink, but its all I can do, however, this connection scheme as also made it so I cant play SACD or DVD-A and hear the great capabilities of these formats. I dont even think this unit can take advantage of them anyway.

Anyway, I first would like some good suggestions on how to break this groundloop or whatever it is that is causing the hum. I have tried redressing teh wires, I have tried different types of electrical connections through different filters, I have tried grounding the chassis and unit, I have tried everything I could think of to stop it, but nothing has worked. I have never fully understood why things like these little digital crappers have these hum problems. What sorts of modifications to the powersupply can I do that will eliminate it, or the grounding scheme within the unit, so that I dont get hum through any of the RCA or coaxial outs.

Next thing I want to know is if this thing is worth upgrading. Seems like nobody likes these units, that the lower end but newer pioneer units are better than this unit. I dont know enough about the digital cuircitry to understand why.

Finaly, I had read that you can hook up to the SACD chip through just a single capacitor, I assume as a shallow slope filter. I would love to know a specific way this might be accomplished on my unit. I dont know if the output level would be great enough to do this, but maybe I could tap into the SACD chip and make a little gain stage to use after this cap output, that would then go into my preamp.