Philadelphia Daily News Plugged In Column.

Byline: Jonathan Takiff

Dec. 10--THE GIZMO: Universal DVD/CD players from Onkyo and Marantz, $999 and $1,599.

WE'VE GOT YOU SURROUNDED: It's hard to enjoy a DVD with just the TV speakers blaring, after you've enjoyed the extra thrills and chills of a multichannel, multispeaker home theater sound system that's attacking from all sides with a hot Dolby Digital or DTS-encoded movie soundtrack.

The same sort of spoil-you-good excitement is now available from two new, surround-sound, music-oriented disc formats, DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD. Both use super-high-resolution digital encoding technologies to achieve rivetingly realistic musical performances -- significantly better than either Dolby Digital or DTS can provide -- from a growing catalog of remastered and freshly wrought multichannel titles.

By spreading the musical load (through a compatible receiver) to five full-range speakers plus a …