Sony BDP-S350 & BDP-S550

[kennyt]

Originally Posted by kal

Do you have any links to your tests Ken? Assuming that no digital processing (mosquito noise, gamma curve adjustment, etc.) is done, I'm a bit confused as to how one players can look or sound any different in Blu-ray playback if all they're used for is a digital transport to output video over HDMI and audio via bitstream (ie: video taken directly off disc at 1080p/24 and no internal decoding of audio).

Or maybe you're not talking about Blu-ray playback but DVD upscaling? Or about bad edits/poorly flagged discs?

Kal

Kal,

I have had Sony BDP-S1, Samsung BDP-1000, BDP-1200, PS3 and personally A-B'd the stand alones to the PS3, all were wired identically with Monster M1000 HDMI cables from played to Meridian HDMax 421 switcher to my display (70" Sony SXRD 1080p (not 24p though). The PS3 was obviously wired via optical to my Meridian 861v4 while each of the standalones were wired via coaxial.

I own and had a rental copy of Spiderman 3 so each player had the same disk in it for the tests. There was no comparison. Each of the standalones had better color, edge detail and contrast, the bass was weak at best from the PS3 when compared to standalones.

FWIW I never did any comparisons with SD DVD's.

[kal]

Thanks for the information Ken. While I don't question what you say, I'm trying to understand how it could even be possible given that the players simply output the digital content that is on the disc directly... (or do they?)

Your results fly in the face of what other reviewers are saying, so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree!

Kal

[legendlarry]

I don't believe this player actually decodes DTS-HD Master Audio. Try it for yourself. You are supposed to set the BD Audio Setting to "Direct" when you want it to pass the track through bitstream to have it decoded at the receiver. This feature does work with the BDP-S550. However, you are supposed to set the BD Audio Setting to "Mix" when you want the player to decode the track, but when you do this, it passes through standard DTS (not Master Audio) to the player. The reason I know this is true is when you try to do this with Dolby TrueHD, you get Dolby TrueHD out on the other end regardless of whether the BD Audio Setting is set to "Direct" or "Mix".

My suspicions are further confirmed by the fact that their website doesn't actually say you can decode Master Audio (it says DTS-HD - not Master Audio) nor does the box mention Master Audio. I've also heard on other forums that Sony went back and forth on the specs on whether they were going to include native Master Audio decoding functionality - I guess they decided against it.

[Charles Nelson]

Both the BDP-S350 and BDP-S550 feature BD-Live, USB storage and PiP while the S550 has 7.1 discrete analog outputs and 1GB of onboard storage. However, with some other advanced features,it is worth the price.