Good price for a good player. At the very least, you got a solid performer for multichannel music, and one of the better performing upconverting DVD players. As others have mentioned, the 981 is HDMI-only. Without looking it up, I believe that the 980 actually uses DVI as the digital video output (HDMI compatible with an adaptor plug), which works out great for people who own older HDTVs that lack HDCP compatibility.