Pioneer BDP-51FD - Manual (Page 3)

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Pioneer BDP-09FD Elite Blu-ray Player (Benchmark) - Page 3
the ability to test your Network Connection
without having to download an update.
With some previous players I have used, the
only way to make sure that you are online
correctly is to try to update the software,
which can then take a long time, but the
Pioneer lets you simply test to make sure it’s
working correctly.
Outside of the Initial Setup menu, there
is a separate Video Adjustments menu. It
contains some presets for certain display types
(LCD, Plasma, Pioneer Plasma, Projector)
as well as three custom types that you can
configure. These will let you easily change
certain settings (Black Level, Pure Cinema
Mode, Block and Mosquito noise reduction,
Gamma Correction) to fine tune the output
of the player based on the source material
and your display.
As many of us are routing all of our
components through a receiver or processor
into a single input on our display, we can’t
easily calibrate that input to be exact for
all of our sources, but using the settings on
the Pioneer we could adjust the Pioneer
internally to make those small adjustments
that it might need. You could also use the
memory settings based on if you are watching
a Blu-ray movie (which would typically have
a much lower level of blocking and noise
due to more advanced codecs and space) or
a DVD, which might need more block noise
reduction due to the lower quality MPEG-2
compression used.
Selecting your output resolution can be done
while you are watching video, in addition to
your initial settings. The Pioneer features all
of the common output formats (1080p at
both 60 and 24 fps, 720p60, 1080i60, 480p
and 480i), but also features Auto, where the
player chooses based on what the display tells
it over HDMI, and Source Direct, which will
output the media at whatever format it was
recorded at. This is an option for those using
an external video processor or scaler , but I
chose to stick with 1080p60 as my display
will not support 1080p24. The Pioneer
always detected my display as 1080i60 for
some reason, no matter if I was using the
HDMI through my receiver or connected
directly to the display, but that was simple
to fix. While the BDP-09FD took a bit
longer to setup than most players due to its
plethora of features, the setup process was
very intuitive and it didn’t have me jumping
back and forth between different menus as
some equipment can.
PerForMance – MusIc
As soon as I had the Pioneer hooked up in
my system, the first thing that I wanted to
test was its audio performance. The Wolfson
DAC’s have been used in many other highly
regarded, dedicated CD players and I wanted
to hear how they would sound. Listening to
“Kid A” from Radiohead, the Pioneer offered
up a very refined, relaxed presentation and I
listened to the whole disc without any fatigue,
completely enjoying the experience. Moving
forward or back a track was a little slow
compared to my Oppo player, but I never
had any issues beyond that. After listening to
a few more albums on the Pioneer over the
week, I wanted to evaluate it head-to-head
with the Oppo, which is a very nice budget
CD player in addition to being a fine DVD
player, and see how it compared.
“The BDP-09FD performed very
well across the board on all of our
benchmark tests.”
Taking some time to make sure all of the
settings on the receiver and the players
were setup correctly and that the receiver
wasn’t introducing anything additional into
the signal, I setup some albums to play at
the same time so I could easily switch back
and forth between them. Additionally, I
found that using the Pioneer in Pure Audio
Mode 1 (no video signals at all) produced a
noticeable increase in sound quality during
CD playback, so I left that enabled while I
performed these listening tests as well. To my
ears, the Oppo provided me a bit more high-
end detail and a bit of a wider soundstage,
whereas the Pioneer provided some extra
weight behind the voices and instruments.
Listening to just a human voice, the Oppo
would let me hear a little bit of extra detail at
the top end, but the Pioneer would express
the power that they were putting behind
their singing.
The presentation of the Oppo was more
forward as well, putting the vocals in front
in the speakers, where the Pioneer seemed to
pull them back behind the speakers a bit and
stay more relaxed. With Pure Audio disabled,
I was able to easily tell the players apart and
felt that the soundstage of the Pioneer shrunk,
and the instruments and vocals sounded like
they were hiding behind a curtain, losing a
good bit of detail. In the end, while I liked
the extra detail that the Oppo added, some
might find that it’s more fatiguing to listen
for a long period of time, or prefer the extra
weight that the Pioneer can put behind the
music. Given that the Oppo player has been
a consistently well regarded CD player, I
think Pioneer can be happy with how the
BDP-09FD sounded.
For playing back music from non-CD
sources, the Pioneer supports very few extra
codecs (most bitrate mp3s and lower bitrate
WMA’s), but no lossless formats such as
FLAC, and no support for WAV files beyond
16-bit and 44.1 KHz sampling rates. The
new chipset that Pioneer used for this player
was chosen for pure performance on Blu-
ray, DVD, and CD playback and support
for more advanced media codecs wasn’t
important in comparison to that. It did
manage to playback the mp3’s that I tested
it with, but I would doubt that many people
are going to purchase a player like this and
used it to play back lossy, compressed audio
files.
I did have one big fault with the Pure Audio
setting, however. The load times on the
Pioneer are not exceptionally fast, in part due
to its use of a recorder transport that is more
accurate but not as speedy as the typically
disc transport, and while it is loading you are
not able to stop it until it’s read the contents
of a CD, or gotten to the menu of a movie.
Unfortunately, Pure Audio does not have a
setting where you can have it be automatically
enabled for CD playback and then disabled
for BluRay or DVD playback, and to disable
it you need to stop the disc and physically