I was not able to tell positively if the 5400 is truly balanced, some of the verbage led me to believe it might be. I saw there are upgrades (mods) that can be done on the 5400 to improve it even more for not much money. If memory serves the Positive Feedback review had the mods done, some type of XLR output improvement and a clocking mechanism. Stock it is still an improvement over the prior 9000es according to reviews, and seems to be a good unit at the price.

I guess it's better to have the HDMI option than not but it would require an external multichannel DAC which I only know of in receivers or processors. In that case an universal player would meet that need.