DVD has proved a phenomenal success in commercial terms and has virtually extinguished the market for budget CD players - you can't really beat a multi-format player when it comes to features.
Early DVD players were not particularly good CD spinners because of the enormous amount of RF interference produced by video circuits, but as this problem has been identified manufacturers have begun to tackle it. Nowadays, most DVD players are competent CD players and a few are very good - often as not they are the ones that play DVD-Audio discs as well.
The great advantage of DVD is that it offers sufficient capacity to hold a feature length movie or music concert and discrete multichannel sound on a disc the size of a CD. In the case of plain DVD-Video discs, the audio is encoded in either the Dolby Digital or DTS format, both of which use 'lossy' compression to fit the audio onto the disc alongside the video data.
You can use a DVD player with your stereo system by connecting the stereo outputs, through this won't give the surround sound benefits that the format specialises in.
