Laserman was our resident laserdisc expert (currently on a break from the forum due to illness) - he reckoned that certain industrial players give better video quality than the top-line US players.
Getting 5.1 off laserdisc is not easy. First your player needs to have an AC3 RF out - if it doesn't have one, it needs to be modded. Then you need to buy a demodulator that converts the AC3 RF into a pure AC3 digital stream. Finally you need a sound card that can record AC3 digital streams through a coaxial/SPDIF input.